Re[2]: Website readability

["Walker, Arlen P" <Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM>]

My, such sarcastic hostility. :{>}

     It's an accepted web design practice to specify different colors for
     visited/unvisited web links. Research conducted by many web denizens
     reveals that more readers suffer from fuzzy short-term memory than
     from fuzzy eyesight. Different link colors enable memory-impaired
     readers to quickly determine if they previously visited a link.

Exactly. And when you specify what colors they change to, deviating from
the colors set in the user's browser, you force the user to rely on this
very same "fuzzy short-term memory" to identify what pages have already
been visited. Which is precisely *why* I said don't mess with the link
colors. If you leave the colors alone, the user will *know* which pages
have already been visited, without having to *try to remember* what color
you decided they should change to.

      You can specify your choice of fonts, font sizes, font
     colors, visited/unvisited link colors, and background colors. You can
     set preferences to override the fonts, colors, and backgrounds of any
     web site you visit.

Only some browsers have that capability, and none that I'm currently using.
All browsers let me set the defaults for things like font size and link
color, but they all allow the site designer to override those settings via
attributes of the background tags and other tags.

<A quick side trip to a compatriot's machine with one of the 4.x browsers
on it.> OK, I see the preferences settings. If I understand them properly,
they let me choose between always seeing what I select or always seeing the
designer's color scheme. Just tried it on a couple of sites which depend
upon using white instead of lt grey as the background, and selecting it
rendered the navigation bars unusable. Similar effects on other pages,
relying on different contrasts. Also, none of the choices seemed to have
any effect whatever on the <SIZE> tag; the too-small text was *still* too
small.

      I suggest exploring your browser's "preferences"
     or "options" section at you earliest convenience. You'll be delighted
     by what you find.

I did. I'm not. If I use those settings, I don't get to see any variety at
all in backgrounds (even the good ones) and it doesn't do a thing for the
size of the text when the designer specifies a size. So I can give up
seeing good ideas while maintaining the unreadabilty of bad sites. This is
an improvement?

     I, too, favored large serif fonts for years but then opted for a pair
     of lineless bifocal glasses. Eureka! "My goodness, I can see, Ma! It's
     a miracle." Using eyeglasses is preferable to reading online text with
     the aid of a magnifying glass.

So, your response to someone who finds your text too small would be "Buy
some eyeglasses?" Wouldn't it be a lot friendlier to your readers if you
just let their browser pick the font size? (BTW, I've *never* favored large
serif fonts, so I'm clueless as to the ",too" portion of that.)

BTW, it appears from some of the more boring commentary I've received on my
post that the phrase "male donkey" has been taken to refer to the gender of
the hypothetical designer in question. This is not the case, as those who
know me will attest. It is merely a two word euphemism for a single word,
beginning with the letter "J," that was placed in there for the sake of
cuteness and humor.


Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
----------------------------------------------
In God we trust; all others must provide data.
----------------------------------------------
Opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.
If JCI had an opinion on this, they'd hire someone else to deliver it.

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=