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[Ludovic Silvestre]

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...
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