4 ms·

Why would it have to look the same everywhere? Browser windows come in varied shapes and sizes. No two OSes and browser combos render text the same way. Do y

Why would it have to look the same everywhere? Browser windows come in varied shapes and sizes. No two OSes and browser combos render text the same way. Do you also use a fixed width div holding everything? One no wider than a VGA screen? I tell my browser what font to use. I want it to render correctly. I know what does. You probably choose something that doesn't.

bitwize 11y ago
It's not the 1990s anymore. The web no longer belongs to us, it belongs to the graphic design and typography crowd. If there's no guarantee how the browser will render text, that's a huge bug in the Web. And using a fixed-width DIV -- or cramming everything into a TABLE cell in the old days -- has been recognized as a remedy to one of the Web's most glaring typographical bugs: the tendency to expand the text flow to the width of the browser, which fucks with a human reader's ability to scan the text.
- alanh 11y ago
  Wrong. The browser is still a user agent. Users can block web fonts (a fantastic idea if you are on shitty internet, by the way), and they have long been able to set a minimum font size Graphic designers who don’t get the web need new jobs.
  - cm3 11y ago
    Why is there no maximum font size setting? It would help with many sites and some of the current design fashion.
    - alanh 11y ago
      I dunno! But you can set page zoom to less than 100% :)
      - cm3 11y ago
        On some sites it's needed to just resize stupidly large fonts while leaving images out of it. Maybe there should be a text zoom function in browsers.
        J_Darnley 11y ago
        That used to be the default action of zoom many years ago. There is probably still some obscure about:config option for it.
        cm3 11y ago
        It's browser.zoom.full in Firefox. Might be nice if it could be used on a per site basis or turned on/off with a button.
        alanh 11y ago
        Yes. This was what IE6 offered, in fact: text-only zoom. And it only worked on pages that did not define font sizes is px, which is to say: it did nothing on a lot of sites.
- esrauch 11y ago
  > If there's no guarantee how the browser will render text, that's a huge bug in the Web. We still live in this world. Chrome isn't even internally consistent, hitting reload in the same browser will sometimes give you different kerning. HTML+CSS is not pdf, even with webfonts.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > If there's no guarantee how the browser will render text, that's a huge bug in the Web. If that is what one wants, use PDF. Seriously. I expect that User Agents will continue to give the user the option of overriding any and all styling the fetched web page wishes to apply until long after I am dead.
  - cm3 11y ago
    Exactly. HTML is fluid and dynamic for a reason. If not then it already would be more like PDF.
  - err4nt 11y ago
    Where is the option to disable CSS in Mobile Safari in iOS? Where is the option to disable CSS in Chrome on Android?
    - cm3 11y ago
      Those are limited use, constrained, black box user agents. There are very capable MUAs as well as simplistic mail clients. Maybe you can enable user scripts in some Android browsers.
      - NoGravitas 11y ago
        Firefox on Android (Fennec) supports Stylish, Greasemonkey, and NoScript.
err4nt 11y ago
Why should it look the same everywhere? * website navigation often contains text * User-Interface controls often contain text I'm less concerned about trying to have my lines break in the same place or having the perfect kerning, but if giving the browser some good fonts to work with can cut down a whole ton of tricky, ongoing, hard-to-debug, hard-to-test edge cases then it's a no-brainer! I still give the whole wishlist, so if for some reason there's no access to google it still does the best it can - my argument is that a professional/commercial web design in 2016 can't lack web fonts because it will co$t more not to have them in developer time. I am that guy that gets paid hourly to track down those bugs. The other bit of CSS that ought to be on every website EVER, is: *, *:before, *:after { text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale; font-kerning: auto; } That bit of CSS is a little bit of magic that makes fonts look the same everywhere, and better than default. This means `font-weight: 500` looks the same in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, on Windows, on iOS, everywhere. I almost always use `font-weight: 400` as my lightest weight. I've got a bunch more of my snippets here: https://gist.github.com/tomhodgins/27c29ecb4aceaefe5cdf https://gist.github.com/tomhodgins/27c29ecb4aceaefe5cdf > Do you also use a fixed width div holding everything? One no wider than a VGA screen? Also got a giggle out of this one - I specialize in responsive web layouts, my job is making fixed-width layouts work on phones and tablets, hundreds of devices to make more $$$ :)
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  Thank god I can force my browser to not do what you tell it to.
  - err4nt 11y ago
    …do you disable CSS? My websites would fare a lot better unstyled than most websites built on top of frameworks like Bootstrap and their 'classy' HTML, but it's still not going to look good without CSS and no online business is going to make more money without CSS than with it. I'm a big fan of terse, straightforward HTML, plus nice CSS on top of that. I've made (and get a lot of use out of) a basic.css stylesheet I built that supports a few basic themes: http://staticresource.com/basic-test.html http://staticresource.com/basic-test.html Let's see some of your HTML J_Darnley :)

bitwize 11y ago

It's not the 1990s anymore. The web no longer belongs to us, it belongs to the graphic design and typography crowd. If there's no guarantee how the browser will render text, that's a huge bug in the Web. And using a fixed-width DIV -- or cramming everything into a TABLE cell in the old days -- has been recognized as a remedy to one of the Web's most glaring typographical bugs: the tendency to expand the text flow to the width of the browser, which fucks with a human reader's ability to scan the text.

alanh 11y ago
Wrong. The browser is still a user agent. Users can block web fonts (a fantastic idea if you are on shitty internet, by the way), and they have long been able to set a minimum font size Graphic designers who don’t get the web need new jobs.
- cm3 11y ago
  Why is there no maximum font size setting? It would help with many sites and some of the current design fashion.
  - alanh 11y ago
    I dunno! But you can set page zoom to less than 100% :)
    - cm3 11y ago
      On some sites it's needed to just resize stupidly large fonts while leaving images out of it. Maybe there should be a text zoom function in browsers.
      - J_Darnley 11y ago
        That used to be the default action of zoom many years ago. There is probably still some obscure about:config option for it.
        cm3 11y ago
        It's browser.zoom.full in Firefox. Might be nice if it could be used on a per site basis or turned on/off with a button.
        alanh 11y ago
        Yes. This was what IE6 offered, in fact: text-only zoom. And it only worked on pages that did not define font sizes is px, which is to say: it did nothing on a lot of sites.
esrauch 11y ago
> If there's no guarantee how the browser will render text, that's a huge bug in the Web. We still live in this world. Chrome isn't even internally consistent, hitting reload in the same browser will sometimes give you different kerning. HTML+CSS is not pdf, even with webfonts.
simoncion 11y ago
> If there's no guarantee how the browser will render text, that's a huge bug in the Web. If that is what one wants, use PDF. Seriously. I expect that User Agents will continue to give the user the option of overriding any and all styling the fetched web page wishes to apply until long after I am dead.
- cm3 11y ago
  Exactly. HTML is fluid and dynamic for a reason. If not then it already would be more like PDF.
- err4nt 11y ago
  Where is the option to disable CSS in Mobile Safari in iOS? Where is the option to disable CSS in Chrome on Android?
  - cm3 11y ago
    Those are limited use, constrained, black box user agents. There are very capable MUAs as well as simplistic mail clients. Maybe you can enable user scripts in some Android browsers.
    - NoGravitas 11y ago
      Firefox on Android (Fennec) supports Stylish, Greasemonkey, and NoScript.

err4nt 11y ago

Why should it look the same everywhere? * website navigation often contains text * User-Interface controls often contain text I'm less concerned about trying to have my lines break in the same place or having the perfect kerning, but if giving the browser some good fonts to work with can cut down a whole ton of tricky, ongoing, hard-to-debug, hard-to-test edge cases then it's a no-brainer! I still give the whole wishlist, so if for some reason there's no access to google it still does the best it can - my argument is that a professional/commercial web design in 2016 can't lack web fonts because it will co$t more not to have them in developer time. I am that guy that gets paid hourly to track down those bugs. The other bit of CSS that ought to be on every website EVER, is: *, *:before, *:after { text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale; font-kerning: auto; } That bit of CSS is a little bit of magic that makes fonts look the same everywhere, and better than default. This means `font-weight: 500` looks the same in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, on Windows, on iOS, everywhere. I almost always use `font-weight: 400` as my lightest weight. I've got a bunch more of my snippets here: https://gist.github.com/tomhodgins/27c29ecb4aceaefe5cdf https://gist.github.com/tomhodgins/27c29ecb4aceaefe5cdf > Do you also use a fixed width div holding everything? One no wider than a VGA screen? Also got a giggle out of this one - I specialize in responsive web layouts, my job is making fixed-width layouts work on phones and tablets, hundreds of devices to make more $$$ :)

J_Darnley 11y ago
Thank god I can force my browser to not do what you tell it to.
- err4nt 11y ago
  …do you disable CSS? My websites would fare a lot better unstyled than most websites built on top of frameworks like Bootstrap and their 'classy' HTML, but it's still not going to look good without CSS and no online business is going to make more money without CSS than with it. I'm a big fan of terse, straightforward HTML, plus nice CSS on top of that. I've made (and get a lot of use out of) a basic.css stylesheet I built that supports a few basic themes: http://staticresource.com/basic-test.html http://staticresource.com/basic-test.html Let's see some of your HTML J_Darnley :)