Is relative style design obsolete now?

Is relative style design, e.g. relative font-size: em, % obsolete now?

since most modern browsers now support automatic zoom in/out, even you
are using fixed font-size.

howa wrote:

Is relative style design, e.g. relative font-size: em, % obsolete now?

It will *never* be obsolete.

since most modern browsers now support automatic zoom in/out, even you
are using fixed font-size.

That's no excuse for poor design. Ignoring user preferences for default font size will only encourage inflexible designs that do not adapt well to variations in user settings.

BTW, my browser prefs would ignore any fixed font-size you care to set, unless it was sufficiently large. Would your layout then fall apart like so many others do?

--
Berg

howa <howachen (AT) gmail (DOT) com> writes:

Is relative style design, e.g. relative font-size: em, % obsolete now?

Of course not.

since most modern browsers now support automatic zoom in/out, even you
are using fixed font-size.

No I'm not, because I'm not stupid. YMMV.

sherm--

--
My blog: http://shermspace.blogspot.com
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net

howa wrote:

Is relative style design, e.g. relative font-size: em, % obsolete now?

since most modern browsers now support automatic zoom in/out, even you
are using fixed font-size.

I would argue that the opposite is true. Design using absolute font
sizes only *appears* to be viable when the designer can reasonably
expect that the browser will do exactly as the designer says. Once the
designer realizes that users can change any font sizes, the designer has
to switch to fluid design in order to address the consequences.

On 2008-11-15, C A Upsdell <cupsdell (AT) upsdell (DOT) invalid> wrote:

howa wrote:
Is relative style design, e.g. relative font-size: em, % obsolete now?

since most modern browsers now support automatic zoom in/out, even you
are using fixed font-size.

I would argue that the opposite is true. Design using absolute font
sizes only *appears* to be viable when the designer can reasonably
expect that the browser will do exactly as the designer says. Once the
designer realizes that users can change any font sizes, the designer has
to switch to fluid design in order to address the consequences.

The point of "zoom" (in Firefox 3 and I think some recent version of IE)
is that it doesn't just change font sizes, it also magnifies images and
explicitly-sized boxes in an attempt to stop layouts breaking.

You can still enlarge just the fonts in FF3 (choose "Zoom Text Only")
which works better if the page is well-designed but what are the chances
of that happening.

As for howa's question, a zoomed fixed-width design is not the nicest
thing to read because of fuzzy blown-up graphics and horizontal
scrolling. A proper fluid design is still better. Zoom is there to
mitigate bad design not encourage it.

Ben C wrote:

Is relative style design, e.g. relative font-size: em, % obsolete now?

since most modern browsers now support automatic zoom in/out, even you
are using fixed font-size.
I would argue that the opposite is true. Design using absolute font
sizes only *appears* to be viable when the designer can reasonably
expect that the browser will do exactly as the designer says. Once the
designer realizes that users can change any font sizes, the designer has
to switch to fluid design in order to address the consequences.

The point of "zoom" (in Firefox 3 and I think some recent version of IE)
is that it doesn't just change font sizes, it also magnifies images and
explicitly-sized boxes in an attempt to stop layouts breaking.

You can still enlarge just the fonts in FF3 (choose "Zoom Text Only")
which works better if the page is well-designed but what are the chances
of that happening.

Zoom Text Only is the option I use. It works very well with all of my
sites, and with most of the sites I visit.

Avoiding zooming images, I think, would be an important objective of
most designers: zooming images degrades the quality of images, which
degrades the perceived quality of the site.

Ben C wrote:

The point of "zoom" (in Firefox 3 and I think some recent version of
IE) is that it doesn't just change font sizes, it also magnifies
images and explicitly-sized boxes in an attempt to stop layouts
breaking.

At least on IE 7, zooming easily messes things up - and zooming upwards
enforces horizontal scroll bar. The latter is unavoidable in general when
zooming means zooming, but the former is probably just broken design. Allow
4 years to have fixed in an almost decent manner.

Zooming is indeed quite different from font size changing. For some odd
reason, many web authors seem to be very confused about this. Maybe this is
because the idea that fixed font size aren't a problem any more due to
zooming possibilities has most of the features of a successful meme: it
sounds pleasant, it sounds modern, it sounds technical, and it's something
you want to memorize and pass forward, since that makes you look cool,
progressive, and helpful. If you wish to preserve this illusion, don't you
ever actually try to _use_ zooming on IE when viewing a page designed to
play with tiny fonts and rigid and crowded layout.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

On 2008-11-15, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

Ben C wrote:

The point of "zoom" (in Firefox 3 and I think some recent version of
IE) is that it doesn't just change font sizes, it also magnifies
images and explicitly-sized boxes in an attempt to stop layouts
breaking.

At least on IE 7, zooming easily messes things up - and zooming upwards
enforces horizontal scroll bar. The latter is unavoidable in general when
zooming means zooming, but the former is probably just broken design.

On Firefox 3 zooming doesn't exactly mean zooming. The initial
containing block is still the size of the viewport so auto width blocks
fit properly with no sideways scrolling. But anything with the width set
on it does get bigger. So in practice you do get plenty of horizontal
scrolling.

Allow 4 years to have fixed in an almost decent manner.

I don't know what the solution is. Can you fix a badly designed site
with browser features? Worth a try, but not easy.

On 2008-11-15, C A Upsdell wrote:
....

Avoiding zooming images, I think, would be an important objective of
most designers: zooming images degrades the quality of images, which
degrades the perceived quality of the site.

I don't find this to be the case at all -- unless you have low
quality images. Many images, especially JPEGs, will scale without
much loss of quality, if any. Just make sure that any image that
will be scaled is of high enough quality that it _can_ be scaled.

--
Chris F.A. Johnson <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
================================================== =================
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)

Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:

Avoiding zooming images, I think, would be an important objective of
most designers: zooming images degrades the quality of images, which
degrades the perceived quality of the site.

I don't find this to be the case at all -- unless you have low
quality images. Many images, especially JPEGs, will scale without
much loss of quality, if any. Just make sure that any image that
will be scaled is of high enough quality that it _can_ be scaled.

We may have to agree to disagree. I focus a lot on good page load
times, which means (among other things) small image files, which means
JPEG images whose qualities are *just* good enough: not good enough to
necessarily still look great when browsers mess with their sizes,
especially given that browser resizing does not maintain image quality
as well as (for example) graphic editors do.

But on some things it is okay to disagree.