Huh? In IE, Tools, Internet options, click the "fonts" button on the first panel: "The fonts you select here are displayed on Web pages and documents which do not have a specified text font"
- it's generic as can be. And I have 13pt Trebuchet
selected in every browser.
So instead of waiting till 96% of all users change browser brand, you want these poor people to find and change a default browser setting that affects all web pages just for the sake of correcting Wikipedia design decisions.
Maybe we can discard all Wikipedias except the English one, if a user really wants to read stuff in another language he can use Bable Fish. My point: you'll have to design for the actual world, not the world as you would like it be.
Erik Zachte.
On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 11:34:37 +0200, Erik Zachte e.p.zachte@chello.nl gave utterance to the following:
Huh? In IE, Tools, Internet options, click the "fonts" button on the first panel: "The fonts you select here are displayed on Web pages and documents which do not have a specified text font"
- it's generic as can be. And I have 13pt Trebuchet
selected in every browser.
So instead of waiting till 96% of all users change browser brand, you want these poor people to find and change a default browser setting that affects all web pages just for the sake of correcting Wikipedia design decisions.
You are so totally not getting this. The default browser setting will not affect "every web page" - it will only affect web pages which do not specify fonts and sizes, i.e. pages designed with accessibility as a priority. The best design decision is to make no design decision regarding font family and size - virtually every significant design website and forum pushes this line. For every user there is an optimal text presentation that they find easy to read, and only the user knows what that is - the designer can't guess it. And there is no question of this being an adjustment "for wikipedia only" - why should the user's optimal font for reading wikipedia be any different from their optimal font for reading anything else on the web?
And as for this 96% IE figure, that's higher than any stat I've seen, even for Win/Mac only. Most stats seem to have IE6 at around 45%, IE5.5 28% and IE5 14%, and it actually appears that IE's market share has topped out and is slowly starting to erode.
Maybe we can discard all Wikipedias except the English one, if a user really wants to read stuff in another language he can use Bable Fish. My point: you'll have to design for the actual world, not the world as you would like it be.
Erik Zachte.
You were the one who posted "What about giving the reader more control over things like font type and size?" I simply pointed out that the mechanism for this already exists and is supported by every visual browser since Mosaic. And it's exactly what Wikipedia's default skin does, whereas Cologne Blue inflicts an (In my opinion, which is pretty well supported among typographers) inferior font at too small a size.
On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Erik Zachte wrote:
Huh? In IE, Tools, Internet options, click the "fonts" button on the first panel: "The fonts you select here are displayed on Web pages and documents which do not have a specified text font"
- it's generic as can be. And I have 13pt Trebuchet
selected in every browser.
So instead of waiting till 96% of all users change browser brand, you want these poor people to find and change a default browser setting that affects all web pages just for the sake of correcting Wikipedia design decisions.
No. We want them to find and change it to get their favorite design. And if they do so, we don't want to say "Well, we made another decision". At least they have the _possibility_ to correct our decision that way. If someone is happy with browsing using the default settings, then they probably will be happy using Wikipedia with their default settings. If they have changed their default settings, they probably will prefer their own settings to ours.
Maybe we can discard all Wikipedias except the English one, if a user really wants to read stuff in another language he can use Bable Fish.
Apparently you would prefer to have some HTML in the page that would make Bable Fish give English nevertheless? The proposal is to give the user the choice of what font to use, rather than to discard all Wikipedias except in one specific font.
My point: you'll have to design for the actual world, not the world as you would like it be.
My point: If it's not broke, don't fix it. And the user may not know what he wants, but he's probably better at guessing it than we are.
Andre Engels
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org