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Design Tip:
Stress Test Your Pages
by Tom Dahm,
Chief Operations Officer,
NetMechanic, Inc.
The central problem of Web Design is that, as a designer, you want to control the precise look and feel of your pages, but the nature of HTML makes that hard to do. HTML wasn't designed to be a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) language; in fact, it was specifically designed not to be so.
The original developers of the language were keenly aware that people would view their Web pages on any number of different computers. Consider that in the late 1980s, when the Web was created, the market for home computers was evenly split between Macintosh and PC computers, and many university students still surfed the Web through text-only "dumb" terminals.
With that in mind, HTML was designed to give the Web browser the final authority over how a page should be rendered, realizing that the browser knew its environment best.
Today, with Windows owning almost 90% of the desktop computer market, it's easy to assume that the browser environment has become standardized. But doing so ignores the fact that many Windows users customize their machines. In particular, users may increase their browser's font size to improve readability.
Increasing your browser's font size is easy to do. Just follow these steps:
- For Microsoft Internet Explorer:
- On the View menu, point to Text Size, and then click the size you want.
- For Netscape Navigator:
- On a PC, choose the View menu, and select Increase Font Size.
- On a Macintosh, choose the Edit menu and select Preferences. Then select Font and set your font size.
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This simple change can be a real surprise for your Web pages.
The most common spot where increasing the font size causes problems is on your navigation bar. Large fonts often cause link text to wrap across multiple lines, making the navigation hard to read. As a rule of thumb, you want the text links in your navigation area to span a single line. If a navigation link straddles two lines, it's hard to tell where one link begins and another ends.
If this happens to your page, you can solve the problem either by using shorter link text, or better yet, by adding a line of white space between your text links.
Large fonts also cause problems in other areas, including places where you use the character to align page elements.
How important is it to test your pages like this? There's no reliable data on the number of users who customize their browsers in this way. As a result, some designers shrug this test off, saying, "I'm not designing this page for my grandmother." Before you do that, remember that, regardless of their age, many people who work with computers all day suffer from eyestrain. Increasing font size is a common cure for this. In addition, this simple font test is a good way to simulate other browser environments, such as WebTV, where text is rendered in large type for long distance reading.
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