In my vain attempt to look for very readable and legible default WordPress themes that don’t sacrifice design, I found this.
I don’t want to sound arrogant, but excuse me, those-who-told-us-to-just-adjust-the-browser’s-text-size, do you really want to make your readers resize their browser text everytime they visit your site?
Oh, and your site happens to be a blog. Ouch.
Now, now. This is where everything you say, you who-told-us-to-just-adjust-the-browser’s-text-size-everytime-we-visit-a-certain-site-which-happens-to-be-a-blog, falls apart. What does a blog contain? It contains text. Lots of it. Er. I suppose there are those pure photoblogs, but with common sense still in place, those are obviously not part of the equation.
Moving along, text is meant to be read, and thus, quoting Bringhurst in his excellent book, The Elements of Typographic Style (3.0), “typography exists to honour content.” Yes, it really does. People go crazy over type. Like I do. An amateur, perhaps, but I still love type. So, the web is here not to make us drool over eyecandy stuff, but to deliver information. That’s why it’s called the information superhighway. That’s why I also theorized back then, when I was a fan of green-text-and-black-background websites, the word Internet to be a portmanteau of the words information and network (I was really off on this one). Therefore, when readers or surfers visit a website, they want to get hold of information, and they do so by reading. It logically follows that the way the information is presented is very clear, and cuts the crap.
So it goes like the following.
- I open up my favorite browser (definitely not Internet Explorer).
- I type something in the address bar and I press enter.
- I wait for the page to load (unfortunately, I still use dial-up)… By the way, this step is optional.
- I read. Or, I click a few links (step three again, crap). Then I read (I try to, that is).
- ???
- Er. Profit! Or not, possibly.
Step five is very crucial, because it is where the reader actually receives or perceives the information. Therein lies the cruelties of letter-spacing: -1px; and other evil hindrances to communication. Therein also lies the part wherein some say “STFU don’t rant, just resize your browser’s text-size you nut-head.”
Now, now. Don’t get cocky. Be thankful that you have readers who actually care about and read your posts. So please, do them a favor and make your content legible and readable. It would be a pain to resize the browser’s text-size, or to select the content and paste it in some nice word processor and typeset it just so we can read it, no?
If step five went well, then step six would probably result in Profit! But then again, your content also matters, so if what you wrote was really off, then, sorry. You have to do better in communicating with your audience.
For reference, here are two excellent articles on web typography, courtesy of Information Architects.
