[Gllug] Role of webmasters (was: Sainsbury's Bank with Linux: online banking followup)

[Dan Kolb]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 05:22:45PM +0100, Ryan Cartwright wrote:
> 
> However, having been frustrated many times by IE CSS hacks, I must say I
> have been sorely tempted to insert browser detection into some of my
> sites and reject any browser that doesn't properly adhere to W3C
> standards. I've never succumbed of course (mostly because browser
> detection is so hard to do properly and it's just a bad idea) but it was
> very tempting to insist on one browser when trying to code a
> multi-lingual site with nested rtl elements!

So, basically, you'd be rejecting all browsers, as pretty much none of them
conform to *all* the W3C standards...
(Take a look at the Acid3 test, f'rexample)

> I've often used a similar argument to Jose's regarding accessibility. Is
> it better to provide some kind of (usually JS) feature which will
> enlarge the text on your site or is it better to educate the visitor
> into changing their browser settings properly. Personally I prefer the
> latter because I feel it provides a better service to my visitors. The
> feedback we've had suggests that most of our visitors prefer it (or at
> least most of those who fed back).  But we have sometimes received
> complaints (from those who have seen text enlargement buttons elsewhere)
> that we don't provide "such a useful service".

Sticking a text enlarge/reduce option should merely be playing with the CSS
properties. One should never use absolute sizes when specifying fonts, anyway -
those with worse eyesight will tend to use a larger browser font; if your site
thinks it knows better, and rescales their text to something they can't read
any more, they will be a tad pissed off.

Dan
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