I will say, that MENTION bbCode is proving quite useful, wouldn’t have found this thread otherwise.
I never said don’t use it; it’s don’t use fat bloated idiotic libraries on normal pages. If you have 10-15k of plain-Jane scripting uncompressed on a page, that gracefully degrades so the page works without it, there’s nothing wrong with that. When you have 50 to 300k of scripting including a 32k compressed library just for some goofy menu animation, tracking software that ignores scripting off users and provides no more information than you should be able to glean from your server logs – THEN it’s a problem.
HEIGHTS? I’m assuming you mean font-size, since fixing the heights on elements tends to… well… if it’s after the main ‘header’ area on a page and isn’t a fixed size footer for a 100% min-heiht layout… bad things tend to happen.
… and do you know what a pain in the ass it is to have to dive for the zoom every time you visit a different site? Now, sure, CTRL+Wheel gets it done, but said zooming also distorts images, often breaks layouts, and if some dumbass made it fixed width zooming often makes it too large to view…
Even with Opera’s massively superior zoom that everyone else has pretty much cloned now (and still suck at compared to Opera) it’s a pain in the ass to even have to bother doing in the first place JUST because someone is using px. You end up ctrl-wheel ctrl-0 so often zipping around the web – it’s just wasting the users time to where the people who change the default size are as likely to bounce to some site where it’s not an issue than struggle with some {expletive omitted} PX based layout.
… and that’s what it’s about; automatically supporting the users preference! Most all browsers let you change the default size so you don’t HAVE to zoom, it’s set for your preference. Opera and IE inherit from the system metric, but you can change it in most other browsers too and the people who need it (or just prefer to sit 3’ from the display instead of having their nose pressed against it) are probably not going to be happy with the result of zoom unless you REALLY tested what your page actually does when zoomed… which NOBODY does, if they did NOBODY would be designing the useless fixed width crap! Useless on my netbook, too small for my desktop, breaks when zoomed on the desktop – yeah, let’s just make it useless for everybody except the handful of people with that magical same mix of screen size and font size as the “designer”.
… and why focus on just screen readers? How about all the Opera users who only enable js on a per site basis? How about the users like Mallory (Stomme Poes) who run browser plugins like noScript? Handhelds that don’t support it or support it poorly?
I mean sure, if you have a page doing something like Google Maps, where JS is the only way to do it, fine… but that’s a very specific and narrow application; 99% of websites out there aren’t pulling those types of stunts, yet you still see them blowing hundreds of K of javascript that to be frank, doesn’t do anything USEFUL.
I’m not saying don’t use javascript – I’m saying that on most websites javascript should be used with an eyedropper to enhance the functionality and experience, NOT supplant it. That’s the mantra that WAS being drilled into us just a few years ago – enhance don’t supplant. Progressive Enhancement == Graceful degradation. A normal website page, like say a page on a forums, blog, normal site for a business – if it doesn’t work without scripting, you’re doing something wrong! Ajax or script manipulating CSS to pretend you have framesets topping the list of the broken idiocy.
Well, even if the arguments against held water (which they do like a steel sieve – that’s the best kind of sieve you know!) the page by Dave Calhoun then goes on to list legitimate reasons to keep using it…
But his understanding of the “original reason” is 100% fiction. The reason to use %/EM for font sizes is so that if the system metric or browser default font size is different, the page text automatically enlarges to match. That’s it. It has NOTHING to do with using the scroll wheel – it’s about supporting 72 dpi handhelds, 75dpi ‘big iron’ *nix, 120dpi desktop users like myself, and moving forward users of the 144dpi setting that is common on Win7 media center installs – As well as people who change the default size in the browser on purpose. What screen readers even have to do with the topic is beyond me making his entire “original reason” bit 100% “pulling it out of his backside” – though he admits that by starting with the phrase “As far as I can tell” – someone needs to research deeper before opening their yap.
Of course, with StackOverflow being the 4chan of software development, it’s no wonder we have people too stupid to even make a coherent statement about it much less understand how it works running their mouths. See the “and their inheritance can be an absolute nightmare” statement, which is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen said on the Internet given how SIMPLE it is; unless of course you’re one of these people that feels the need to declare font-size on EVERY element for Christmas only knows what reason. Good rule of thumb, if it’s not a heading, leave it alone! Set your starting size on body, scale headings up from that, where’s the problem? The respondents there are just as blissfully unaware of large font/120 dpi users and people who change the browser default as the first article you linked to was.
The thing is it’s not about using graceful degrading javascript and the COMPLETE LIE of focusing on nothing but screen readers, as if that’s the only thing that matters in terms of ‘accessibility’ – forgetting the people who intentionally block scripts due to not trusting them, turning them off due to the bandwidth INCREASE due to things like metered connections or narrow pipes, handhelds still in circulation who can’t handle scripting, said scripting possibly making targeting narrow screens with media types harder… I could go on for another two paragraphs about that.
In general, the pages you linked to are by people who didn’t understand the point of the technologies they were flapping their gums over, or focused on one narrow reason instead of the big picture where there are dozens of reasons… Just like most people don’t get the POINT of HTML… delivering content in a device neutral manner so the user agent can best determine how to show it; playing to the point of CSS – customizing presentation for specific targets. Hence “separation of presentation from content”.
They also started to tread into the ‘statistics defense’ – which most always sets off my BS Alarm, since that is one of the ‘lame excuses’; I call them “Percenters” – oh this group is only 1% so who cares, this group is only 5% we don’t need to worry about them, Opera users are only 3% so they can go shtup themselves. These people aren’t my ‘target audience’ so who cares what happens when they visit – until you add it all together and realize you’ve alienated 100% of potential visitors in one way or the other.
Case in point. No offense, but BULLCOOKIES! It was not just about IE6… IE7 auto-enlarges to the system metric… IE8/newer does auto-adjust the zoom but many people turn that off and set it back to the old scaling so they don’t get badly resized images and broken layouts, you can make FF and Chrome default larger, Opera obeys the host OS system metric for pages too! It was NEVER about “just IE6” – don’t know who started that rumor – probably one of those webkit developers who still thinks “but all computers think in 96dpi”. %/EM is about automatically scaling to the users default preference font size WITHOUT image distortions from them being resized and without the user having to even THINK about using the zoom… because for many users if they have to zoom, they’ll not even bother coming back to the site. Instant bounce.
Hell, I’d not visit 90% of vBull based websites (including this one) if I hadn’t taken the time to add a custom user.css to override it’s retarded 13px font sizes. (Thanks vBull!)
Falls into the same misinformation as the whole 62.5% rubbish. That bekaptah nonsense being made by the morons who completely missed the entire point of %/em in the first place – that being 1EM/100% is NOT supposed to automatically be the same size or ratio to pixels across systems. That’s WHY you’re supposed to use it… so that it automatically enlarges to the host OS default size and/or browser default size without the user having to play with the zoom on every site-load or browser startup!
… and it’s not like %/em is hard? Where in blazes do people get that nonsense? Oh wait, probably from the fixed width layout idiots, Photoshop jockeys with their “not viable for web deployment – but I can do it in Photoshop” garbage, and a whole host of other layout concepts that should have been left on the cutting room floor (see the wonderful “three across equal width equal height with text inside it in the middle of the main content column” idiocy.)
I mean really, you set it once on body… you scale your headings which are the only things that should really have size changes based off that body declaration… MAYBE make sidebar stuff a hair smaller just so it doesn’t distract from the content – DONE. It’s not rocket science.
… and there are cases where PX is your only sane choice – like when you have fixed size images you need to interact with, or a fixed height footer due to wanting a 100% min-height layout – in those cases you’re best off just using a size nobody is going to get their panties in a twist over being too small… so 14px minimum, 16px or larger better. Just don’t do it to the whole page – menus, headings behind image replacements (and set overflow to cut it off thanks to firefox’s sweetly retarded cousin of Netscape 4 behavior)… etc… So long as the CONTENT people are actually visiting the site for is dynamic (%/em), you can play it a bit fast and loose and use px on things like menus, disclaimer in the footer, etc. (though if Gecko wasn’t a total retard about adding together %/em, you could use %/em for fixed footers). Remember, window dressing is never as important as what the customer came in the door for… which in the case of a website is the CONTENT.
Unless of course you’re dumb enough to try and declare a content area with a fixed height, fixed width, and all the other design concepts that burns the mere notion of an accessible website at the stake, pisses on the ashes, and then a week later decides to defile it’s grave.
