[plug] Web Browser Visualisation

[Cameron Patrick]

Craig Ringer wrote:

> My favourite, without any doubt at all, is sites that set a relative 
> font size like "70%" (it's not like the user would set the browser's 
> default font to the one they want to READ or anything...) and then set a 
> leading in pixels. *arrggh*.

Heh.  The Microsoft web site did this at one point.  Made reading
"knowledge base" articles... interesting.

One of my own pet hates in this area is pages which specify a page
width in pixels.  You either get a skinny little column because your
screen is much wider than anticipated (possibly with line breaks in
ugly places because your preferred font size is larger than the
designer's) or pages that require horizontal scrolling because your
browser window isn't full-screen, or has a few pixels more window
border on the side than IE.  Giving column widths in ems can help with
the first problem but doesn't cope with browser windows /narrower/
than expected.  Worse, often a full-screen browser window will give
ridiculously wide lines, so making the text width a percentage of the
browser window is also sucky.  If there's a good solution to all this,
I don't know what it is.  (Hmm, use Javascript to dynamically resize
columns with various heuristics depending on the window size?
A disturbing idea but might be fun to try...)

> >The CSS spec actually recommends scaling px'es relative to a reference
> >pixel of "one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 90dpi and a
> >distance from the reader of an arms length" if your display resolution
> >is unusually high or low.  (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS1#length-units)
> 
> What a horrifying kludge.

:-)  It's really the only sane solution if you want pages to look okay
on a 600dpi+ print-out though.

Cameron.