Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Schofield vs. Gruber
Dan Hon reports on the latest squabble, this time between Jack Schofield of Onlineblog and John Gruber of Daring Fireball.
Normally a tizzy over relative font sizing in CSS and reversed out text wouldn’t be worth a mention, but since I can’t recall the last time I agreed with something the Guardian’s curmudgeonly technology writer wrote, I feel moved to pass comment.
Schofield says that he can’t stomach Gruber’s design because the oodles of text in tiny font sizes and white-on-grey colour scheme make it impossible to read for those with anything other than 20/20 vision. I couldn’t agree more: the site is completely illegible to me as it is, so I always whack the font size up a good couple of notches.
Jack S. can’t do this, because he uses Internet Explorer (despite constantly reccomending Gecko-based browsers in the Guardian) and Gruber has set his fonts to display at specific sizes, which breaks Explorer’s ability to resize the text. Of course, this is a bug in the browser rather than Gruber’s stylesheet, but that is no real excuse: websites should be readable above all else. I’ll happily admit taht this site looks like a dog’s dinner, but no one should have a problem reading it. After a quick look at the innards of the undeniably pretty Daring Fireball, a blind user with a screen-reader would be better able to digest the content of the site than short-sighted readers like Mr. Schofield and myself armed only with Explorer, which, despite its many flaws, is the most popular browser.
Unfortunately, Schofield’s broadside has a most trollish tone, and his famous antipathy towards Apple raises the teensiest suspicion that a PC pundit with a slightly flawed site design would not have felt the wrath to the same extent. Let’s hope this doesn’t degenerate into a Winer-Pilgrim style pissing contest, and instead makes web designers think anew about us poor bespectacled web users, who can’t actually read half the web.
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