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Teeny tiny text is fine for a lot of people...but there really are a very large number of people – e.g. with less than optimal eyesight – for whom larger text in shorter lines is immediately more comfortable and natural
This seems to be a good argument for the restoration of the old 'font size' buttons which got binned in the mad dash to make LFGSS look like everything else.
gbj_tester-
This seems to be a good argument for the restoration of the old 'font size' buttons which got binned in the mad dash to make LFGSS look like everything else.
I tend to agree. Browser size controls can work in different ways (some change the size of elements and images etc. as well, some don't) and you might not want to change every site, and you might want it to remember different settings for different sites. If you're controlling the changes to the style sheets on a per-site basis it's probably easier to manage & predict how the layout adjusts and it's probably more friendly to many users, if much less 'best practice'.
Making that setting clear and obvious, wherever it is, is probably the most important thing. In the course of testing websites and apps and so on I see far more people that have increased the default text size on their iPhones than on their desktop web browser (that may be down to the inevitably even-teeny-tinier text on a phone making it more necessary of course). But that notwithstanding, a larger default text size makes sense for a lot of users, probably the majority of users.
It's WWW growing pains really. If everything was nicely responsive and everyone knew how to use the browser size adjustment then all would be sparkles and rainbows. I do sympathise with the efforts being made to get to that point. There's a similar issue on the horizon with resolution-independent sizing. That going to be interesting/painful.
Regal
Basically, people have gotten very used to reading terribly-typeset text in all sorts of media and contexts, and filtering out the noise and clutter. (In the 1950s people used to complain about paper being too white to read comfortably outdoors, for example.)
Teeny tiny text is fine for a lot of people (power user types like us who spend all day using computers/smartphones/tablets) but there really are a very large number of people – e.g. with less than optimal eyesight – for whom larger text in shorter lines is immediately more comfortable and natural, and those people may also not be tech-savvy and not know how to increase the text size.
FWIW I think I preferred the even-larger text that Microcosm-LFGSS launched with.