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.

Posted at 4pm on 13/07/03 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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