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As a test of ‘just what happens when you do it?’, I’ve set the minumum font size of my browser to 12px. Many sites, including dx13 itself, use font sizes smaller than this. For example, the font used for the tabs above are size 10px. This means that they are now appearing larger than when I originally designed them. Fortunately on this page, it doesn’t make much difference to the layout.

The reason I’ve changed my minimum font size is that too many sites seem to be using small text (ie less than 12px) for the content of their site, the articles and musings they have. This is very annoying for me as it makes reading long articles exercises in trying to remember which line comes next due to them all being so crammed together. I don’t have a problem at all with navigation being 10px, as it’s generally not large, long blocks of text. It’s not a problem to follow what’s going on there.

It does make it fairly annoying that I have to up all my font sizes to 12px or more, but I may be able to cope. I’ll have to see which is the lesser evil, not being able to read pages or having the design mess up sometimes.

Further to this, I know it’s been advanced before, but how about being able to set font sizes for sites, rather than just a blanket of all sites. This would mean that when I hit any article on www.smalltext.com the fonts would all be upped to a reasonable size. However, when I hit www.largetext-smallnav.com it would appear as the designer intended, kudos for them not making me read tiny text in articles! I guess that this may break on sites like www.website.com/my_little_site/ where you don’t want other sites hosted as folders off the main www.website.com domain also shrunk.

I would put forward the best way to sort this out would be to have an option on the View menu, say ‘Set font size for site…’. This would then bring up a dialog for setting just where you wanted the break to come. For the above example you would have:

All at:
o www.website.com
o www.website.com/my_little_site/

Parsing the forward slashes as the delimiters for different sites. I think this would be a vast improvement on the current facilities available.