Sunday, March 19, 2006

Blogger UI

After much deliberation, I've started blogging.

Notice that Blogger's default page layouts can do with a lot of improvement. Most page layouts contain a small strip of content in the middle with excessive whitespace on both sides. On large displays this leads to poor readability. Increasing text size in Firefox (View-> Text Size or Ctrl + +/- shortcut keys) does not scale the content width, but only makes the fonts larger.

Some web developers seem to have the idea that if you want to view their web page sproperly, you go view it on their monitor and browser. Ugh!

Web pages are also user interfaces and should lend themselves to some extent of customization by the end user. This implies that web pages look good on any sane screen resolution, and allow the user to increase/decrease the font size as required. I often tend to increase the default text size - sometimes upto 12, 14 pt - for easier reading.

A good example of such a page is Gmail. Try increasing the font size in Gmail and see how all the HTML elements scale up neatly. Since the print version of most webpages are devoid of tables, ads, etc., they tend to scale nicely and I mostly end up reading the print version rather than the onscreen rendition.

The nice thing about Blogger however is that all this can be addressed. A look at the CSS (in the Blogger Template) shows that the content div is hardwired to some ~600px. I've modified the template for this blog so Firefox users can increase/decrease text size for their comfort. Take a look at the HTML source for this page for the changes.

Colors, I prefer a black background with yellowish text (rgb:255/255/200, #ffffc7). You monitor is a light source and reading black text on white background is akin to reading text written on a light bulb.

As for the fonts, I've pretty much settled on Trebuchet MS as my default variable width font and Lucida Sans as the fixed width font. For print I prefer Georgia. More information about selecting fonts is available in Andy Hume's excellent article The Anatomy of Web Fonts.

That's a good start - Hello world!

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