Saturday, 13 September 2003

A few design adjustments

I’ve made a few minor changes to the stylesheet and underlying code:

  • Entries are now color-coded by author, comme le Volokh Conspiracy: I’m this color, while this is Brock’s color. No, I’m not identifying the colors by name, since Brock and I may decide to change them around a bit.
  • I’m now using borders for link underlining, like Matthew does at A Fearful Symmetry. I haven’t decided if I like it yet or not; there may be more experiments to come.

A final note: some people seem to find the default font size of Signifying Nothing too big. This is apparently the result of two factors:

  1. Browser default font sizes are too big in general. IE, Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird default to a 16 point font, which is close to reasonable if you are legally blind or your monitor is a JumboTron, but otherwise a tad on the large side (I usually adjust it to the 12–14 point range).
  2. Because of the first item, many people include FONT tags or CSS to reduce your font size to something that’s reasonable (Outside the Beltway does this noticeably, rendering it mostly unreadable using my default font size). Unfortunately that shoots to hell the accessibility advantages of CSS over proprietary tags.

I don’t have any perfect advice here. No browser that I know of lets you do CSS or font size overrides for particular sites, which seems like an odd oversight, since CSS is designed to allow user overrides of settings. However, all major browsers have font size adjustments in their menus you can use on an ad hoc basis to compensate for font drift between sites.