05 February 2009

A Coding Horror horror

Jeff Atwood wrote an awful post on The Two Types of Browser Zoom. He sums up the awfulness in this one sentence:

Honestly, I can’t see much use for traditional browser font sizing.

Reader B.S.Smith’s comment scores a bulls-eye:

I’m a little bit shocked whenever anyone suggests that if they aren’t using it, then it must not matter. There is always someone with a view 180 degrees out from yours and obviously the text vs whole-page zoom issue has two (disturbingly passionate) points of view. The only good solution is to leave it up to the idividual[sic] user (remember them?). Any browser that fails in that is giving up on a portion of it’s[sic] potential maketshare.

Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as too many preferences. This is not one of those cases. Actually, this isn’t even really a preference at all. We’re talking about two different—though superficially similar—features.

The really dangerous thought here, though, is the way we so often say “I can’t see much use for...” That should be a sure sign to us that we need to seek out the opposing point-of-view.

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