Any workarounds to the illegible website Fixed Fontsize Fetish?

[perfb]

while Google and Yahoo allow for easy legibilty on new hi-res screens
with truly resizable fonts, it seems most corp websites like
aa.com and bofa.com etc etc, use fixed non-resizable fonts, designed
for 800x600 res, that become practically illegible on hi-res screens.

Do any browsers work around this idiotic design fetish? AFAIK, IE
doesnt, switching to 'largest' font size makes no diff on these
websites.

It seems most people deal with this by crippling their screen res down
to 800x600, but there has got to be a better way.

Is there some magic setting in IE to override the website font setting?
Will Firefox allow for true user font size settings?

It is truly a ridiculous commentary on 'progress', imho.

 

[Chris Morris]

Is there some magic setting in IE to override the website font setting?
Will Firefox allow for true user font size settings?

In IE6, Tools > Internet Options > General > Accessibility > Ignore
font sizes ...

In more recent graphical browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror,
etc), font-resizing is generally fairly straightforward. Several of
these browsers also have a "minimum font size" option, which is very
useful for taking away most of the need to resize text for every new
site. Opera has the slight edge over the others that it can also
resize images of text that are too small to read, though its image
resizing isn't perfect.

Ignoring font-sizes can occasionally make such a big mess of the
layout that the text becomes unreadable, if the original design was
sufficiently poor quality - if that happens, then Opera has the option
to ignore all author styling easily accessible, and it can be done in
the other browsers with slightly more effort.

A few browsers will also save your font-size settings on a per-site
basis (Galeon, for example, but that's Linux-only) which can be useful
if there's a site you need to visit regularly that has bad font sizes.

Alternatively you could just use Lynx and never have to worry about
font sizes again, but that's not always practical

 

[perfb]

example:

illegible at hi-res and non resizable:

1: http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/169/169.css&page=1

resizable and legible at hi-res:

2: http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/170/170.css&page=1

why would websites opt for the first nonresizable settings, instead of
the second resizable settings? I am baffled ... but impressed by #2!

 

[Spartanicus]

resizable and legible at hi-res:

2: http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/170/170.css&page=1

Just legible, it doesn't respect my configured font size for body text.

p {padding:10px 30px 10px 20px; font-size:0.9em; line-height:1.6}

Bloody dezigners.

 

[Arne]

In IE6, Tools > Internet Options > General > Accessibility > Ignore
font sizes ...

In more recent graphical browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror,
etc), font-resizing is generally fairly straightforward. Several of
these browsers also have a "minimum font size" option, which is very
useful for taking away most of the need to resize text for every new
site. Opera has the slight edge over the others that it can also
resize images of text that are too small to read, though its image
resizing isn't perfect.

In Mozilla (and I belive also in Firefox) the feature in Preferences >
Advanced > Mouse Wheel is that you can use the wheel to easy resizing
the font. I push the Shift key with the wheel to do that, and
Ctrl+wheel to fast move in the browsing history.

--
/Arne
Now killing all top posters and posters who don't quote
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[oops!!]

In Firefox, resizing fonts can be done by pressing the CTRL key and using the mouse wheel.

Zee

 

[perfb]

thanks for the tip, tried the IE6, Tools > Internet Options > General >
Accessibility > Ignore
font sizes setting, and it works for font size, but webpage line
spacing not changed so text overlaps, so still is illegible! hmmm

 

[perfb]

what about setting IE to use a fixed css style sheet, would that work?
or, would it wreak havoc? i.e. lets say i pick one of the csszengarden
example style sheets and tell IE to use it for all webpages, would that
work? I would try it, but I think the chances are negligible to 0 that
there is any workaround to fix this web browsing style sheet insanity.

Ideally, it would be nice to have a consistent user-settable layout
from website to website, if I want white text on a blue background no
matter what website I am looking at, why cant I? As it is now, jumping
around from website to website is a chaotic cacophony of jarring styles
and garish colors, jumping from one site's bright white background to
another's black background gets nauseating after a while, Very
unpleasant, imho.

It sounds like the user css option in IE might have been intended to
address this, but does it really work? hmmmm

 

[Chris Morris]

thanks for the tip, tried the IE6, Tools > Internet Options > General >
Accessibility > Ignore
font sizes setting, and it works for font size, but webpage line
spacing not changed so text overlaps, so still is illegible! hmmm

Ah, if they've also set line-height then that could happen. Arguably
it's a bug that over-riding font-size settings doesn't also over-ride
line-height.

Workaround: also add a user stylesheet (same part of the options) that
contains * { line-height: 1.2 !important; }

Alternative workaround I: Use a different browser.

Alternative workaround II: Use a different website.

Alternative workaround III: sue the website owner under its local
disability discrimination laws, if any.