On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 23:38:06 +0200, Erik Zachte e.p.zachte@chello.nl gave utterance to the following:
What about giving the reader more control over things like font type and size ?
This is really not so hard to do. A special page could offer choices in font size, style and colour. The choices would be stored in a cookie (ok, a small minority will not benefit from this). Settings are applied through javascript after the page has loaded. So, minimal overhead for the server, it just includes a static js file. Direct feedback for the user, click a different size and presto! view the results. These formatting options might be added to the preferences page.
There's really no need to do any of the above. One gives the reader full control over font size and face simply by not specifying them in the HTML or stylesheet. They are then rendered in the user's preferred default which they set in their browser. (Any user who seriously cares about optimizing readability will probably be using a browser other than IE where the size control options are rather limited)