Eric Siegmund has two posts commenting on various blogs and how user-friendly they are. (Ironically, his permalinks don’t work despite not being a blogspot blog.)* A very interesting and worthwhile topic; I know I find a lot of blogs almost unreadable.
He lumps OTB in with sites that are hard to read because their fonts are too small:
This is soooo easy to fix. If you’re using Cascading Style Sheets (and why wouldn’t you?), don’t specify a font-size for your body text. Let the visitor’s browser preferences rule; your visitor, after all, knows better than you what size font best fits his or her monitor resolution and corrective lens prescription. But if you just have to specify a font-size — if you just can’t allow your visitor that kind of unfettered license — pick a big size. Instapundit uses 12 pixel Verdana; Roger Simon goes even bigger, with 14px Verdana. The text on these blogs is quite legible, regardless of your monitor’s resolution (mine is a hefty 1280×1024). On the flip side are sites like Outside the Beltway, which specifies a body text of small and a blockquote text (generally, the quote in a box within a given post) of extra-small. When you couple that specification with a serif font (he uses Palatino/Georgia) which is less legible on a computer screen than a sans-serif, it makes for tough reading. Depending on the time of day, I simply can’t read OTB without bumping my browser text-size setting a couple of notches. Even Lileks — whom I never fail to read, however squint-eyedly — needs to get with the program. Mr. Lileks gets points for using Adobe GoLive as his layout program, but loses them and more for continuing to use the font-size tag (oh, the shame of it all!) instead of using CSS to handle that chore. And Trebuchet MS, his font of choice (and mine), is smallish to begin with.
I’ll be glad to fix this if this is a problem. Oddly, I’ve always thought the posting font on my site was a little TOO BIG.
*Apparently, Blogger itself sucks, not just Blogspot.
Update (13:29): I’ve made a couple of minor changes to the CSS and Eric has now conferred “A blessing on [my] head.”
Update (13:47): Eric has now stopped using Blogger software and is so fed up with it he’s just manually posting until he can get MT set up. Heh.
