I just removed the setting of font-family from the stylesheet of this blog. What does this mean? Now it will pick up the fonts that you have set in your browser. Yes, if you did not know this already, you can set your preference of fonts to display web pages in your browser. You can even command the browser to override the site’s own stylesheet with your settings. You have complete control over rendering of a web site.
This is part of my experiment to give up control. There are two directions a design can go in. One is to dictate everything to the browser, the other is to use everything from the browser. I wanted to try the second option, not to discover anything specific, but to see the difference in the experience. I think it is important since you can choose to override my styles anytime you want.
If you have not found the place to set your fonts in the browser yet, it will be either in Tools -> Options or Edit -> Preferences depending on the browser and the platform you are on. Give it a try and let me know if this is power or bother for you.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:31 am
A very good step towards higher accessibility/usability you describe here. Many “Web Developers”, “Web Designers” and now “Web Browsers” wants to dictate the user (the book “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug is recommended reading) and the browser on how they interact with the site, like chaotic navigation, flash required pages, IE optimized pages, slow loading pages, javascript from hell and now, how the browser should interact with the site.
Browser examples: How feeds are read/parsed, how error codes are handled, how the default browser font doesn’t match from system to system (firefox on Windows vs GNU/Linux). (Am I off here? Or does it make sense?)
Any of you remember how the default colours in the old Netscape Navigator was? Horrific.
September 23rd, 2007 at 4:09 pm
[...] an extension of this, but as part of my experiment to give up control, I have unset the fonts and font sizes for this blog. Which means that currently it is using those [...]