Acidus wrote:

My mom is not going to design her own style style for a website. But when my mom bumbs the font size of http://www.cnn.com up 2 levels and suddenly the menu bar is going off the screen and text doesn't fit in boxes anymore, that's is a problem.

Agreed, though I'm not convinced that issue is 100% the fault of the page author. I don't think the tools available really are sufficient. If a layout is to stay consistent when the text is upsized, for example, then a whole cascade of changes to the rest of the layout may be required. I should probably widen the content area so the text doesn't have 3 words per line. But if the screen resolution is 800x600 (as it often is) then perhaps I'm off the screen, so I have to find out how big the browser window is and try to fit to that. Since I'm so constrained, maybe the solution is to remove my navigation sidebar so that it's not taking up so much horizontal space, so i now have to dynamically recreate that navigational content in a bottom bar or something. None of that's impossible, but it's a far cry from the trivial effort you seem to imply.

Fundamentally, the ability to resize the text you're reading without fucking up the rest of the layout is a pretty new problem and one that not a lot of people are equipped to deal with. I repeat, UI design is hard. People -- perhaps especially programmers -- aren't good at it, as a rule.

When I have a 1400x900 screen and a blog renders as a thin vertical strip maybe 700 pixels across thats just silly.

Ok, but you're .5% of the population. Not to be a dick, but in my role as a web developer with limited resources, I probably don't care much about you. I care about the vast majority of the browsing population who are still rocking 800x600 or 1024x768.

I'm sympathetic to your argument that a site should be able to handle all of those situations dynamically. Maybe I'm not smart enough, and I'm certainly not a web genius, but I really don't believe it's pure laziness that this doesn't happen. If it was trivial, someone would be doing it.

I've only got a vague notion of how I'd do it, because it's not just a matter of jacking text up and widening the box that text is in. You actually have to add a fair bit of logic to the page, detailing how to handle various situations.

I dunno, maybe I'm over (under?) thinking this or something.

RE: Publishing on the Web Is Different!