On Wednesday, 15 February 2012 at 15:59:48 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
That's not good (and I don't mean because of the JS - it's
always possible to have non-JS fallback). This is a classic
case of narrowly optimizing for one specific metric (ie,
getting a consistent words-per-line) instead of always keeping
an eye on the big picture. The problem this creates is that
font sizes become too uncontrolled:
The font sizes aren't uncontrollable if every
font-size/width/height/etc uses em as unit. You must use a
elastic layout to make it work.
First of all, shrinking the window *should* re-flow the text,
not cause it to be too small to read. A shorter line length is
*much* better than tiny text.
If you looked at my code, you'll see that I never set the body
font-size below 100% (the example given in the link doesn't take
that problem into account). This way, the line length is
maintained unless the font become too small.
Second, I tried the example:
http://jaredstein.org/resources/stein/js/fonter.html
The text on that page (when I have JS on) is so enormous, that
I actually have a *very* hard time reading it. Much, much
harder than reading really long lines. I have to go messing
around with my browser's window size just to make it readable.
I shouldn't have to do that, I've never had to do that before,
and honestly, who would ever even *think* to do that?
There's several reasons why you have difficulties to read the
text:
1. You're standing too close to the screen.
2. Black text in white background (my eyes become tired after a
long reading period because of this).
3. You're not used to it.
Besides, the web dev can change the ratio between the
font-size/window.width, making the text a little smaller/bigger.
Yea, you *could* clamp the max and min font sizes, but it's
really just a goofy approach overall. There's a reason that
desktop apps never scale by messing with font size. Consistent
controlled font size just turns out to be more important than
consistent line length. You're much better off just using the
CSS "max-width" (or something like that, I forget the exact
name) and maybe "min-width", both specified in em of course.
In any case, this is one of the reasons I hate the modern web.
On the user's side, content and view have become completely
married together. That's a *huge* step backwards. Thanks to a
very large effort put into standard file formats and general
computer-to-computer interop, it used to be that any content
could be viewed in any program, any UI, any style, any anything
the *user* wanted. We had achieved a computing golden age! But
once things moved to the web, that got completely thrown out
the window as interface is now inseparably *bundled* with
content once again (and vice versa - content comes inseparably
bundled with the interface). While model-view separation is
popular among webdevs, that separation exists completely on the
developer's side, not the user's side. Of course in this
particular case, it's not quite so bad because there's lots of
different interfaces to the same NNTP server, but still...
Check out this: http://axr.vg/
