Tupperware's Senior Friendly/Shrink Text magnifying

[Keith Jenkins]

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 09:28:21 -0800 (PST), Thomas Dowling
<tdowling at ohiolink.edu> wrote:
> You'll be better off writing pages that don't need such a kludge.  Give
> your users credit for having their font sizes set they way they want and
> don't mess with that setting.

I agree with Thomas Dowling here.  A user should (and can!) simply be
able to tell her web browser to use a larger font size, regardless of
how the page is coded.

> Absolute font sizes should be set by the user only . . .
> "Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute
> values and style sheet property values...in CSS, use 'em' or percentage
> lengths rather than 'pt' or 'cm'".  Or 'px' for that matter.

This was indeed a problem with older browsers, such as IE and
Netscape, and is probably what inspired the cookie+CSS approach such
as is found on the Tupperware site.

But this is no longer a problem with the latest browsers.  Firefox is
able to resize fonts even when they are defined absolutely (12pt,
0.5cm, etc.), and Opera takes it a step further and resizes EVERYTHING
on the page, including images.  However, it's still a good idea to use
relative sizes (120%, etc.) on your own site, for the benefit of the
masses of people still using IE and older versions of Netscape.

Some users may not be aware that they have the power to change font
sizes.  But if you show them once (it's usually in the "View" menu of
the browser), then they will have font-size control of every site they
visit, not just your library's site.

-Keith

Keith Jenkins, Metadata Librarian
Mann Library, Cornell University
kgj2 at cornell.edu