On Monday, July 21, 2003, at 05:38 PM, Erik Zachte wrote:
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.
This sounds like a great idea. K5 does something similar, and it's nice to be able to select your own fonts.
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.
Hmm... One of the things I've learned while designing websites is that you should never count on any two user's JavaScript implementations doing the same thing. That's probably a cynical point of view, but still -- the differences between JavaScript implementations can vary quite a lot. I'm not sure that's really the way to go. (OTOH, I don't have any better ideas -- embedding a tiny piece of CSS in each page served to a registered user would be nice, but most likely way too server-intensive.)