Almost every web site i visit these days seems to have a style sheet written by some idiot who thinks “if it looks good on my screen using my eyes then it’s perfect for everyone”.

WRONG

Specifying widths in pixels is NOT for text. It’s for images, you morons.

For one thing, small fonts suck if you have a large, high-resolution monitor. or if you have bad eyesight. or if you’re getting older (I was helping my mother find a house to buy a few days ago and the real-estate web site we were searching was basically unreadable for her – she could see the house pictures but I had to read out the text, and even I found that difficult because of the tiny font).

For another thing, if you have a wide-screen monitor and a browser window to suit it, then a fixed-width column of 560 pixels or so looks really bloody stupid in the middle of a huge expanse of empty white space, even with another column or two at the sides for meta-stuff.

There are tools, like the Stylish and NoSquint plugins for Firefox/Iceweasel that help you make a site more readable, regardless of what the so-called “designer” perpetrated. But, cool as those tools are, they just should not be necessary. And I, as a user of the web site, shouldn’t have to spend 5, 10, 20, or more minutes reading and understanding their style sheet so i can hack up a tweak for it JUST TO MAKE IT READABLE.

They’re the designers, that’s their job, not mine. That’s what they’re (presumably) getting paid for – and yes, the commercial/professional web sites tend to be far worse offenders than the amateur sites.

Web designers should have enough bloody sense to make their sites look good in ANY font size, at ANY window width. It’s not hard. In fact, it’s easier and much less work than hard-coding pixel sizes.

I’m not a web designer, nor am I anything remotely like an expert in CSS or style sheets. I’m a systems geek. But if I can figure this stuff out, when it’s not even my job to do so and i have no intrinsic interest in the subject, then why the hell can’t they? Don’t they take pride in their work? Don’t they care that visitors to their web sites will think they’re clueless morons for perpetrating yet another squint-eyed monstrosity on the web? Don’t their employers give a damn?

To summarise:

1. text widths in style sheets should be specified in relative units such as percentage or ‘em’ units.
2. font sizes should be specified in ‘em’ units, if you must specify them at all.
3. all other non-image/embedded-media sizes should also be specified in ‘em’ units.

Doing those three simple things will ensure that your web site looks good to all visitors, no matter what size screen/window they have, and no matter what font-size they have to use to be able to read it.

end-of-rant.

PS: My own hacked-up theme/style-sheet for this blog is far from perfect….but I did take the time to make sure all the widths and font-sizes were relative. If there are any CSS bugs feel free to point them out and i’ll fix them ASAP…like I said, I’m far from an expert in CSS.

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