“IF IT WAS JUST ME AND A TAMBOURINE,
IT WOULD STILL BE THE FALL”
– Mark E. Smith

Right, so zoom layouts have had the better part of a year to take off, and they haven’t. That’s OK; they are an experimental Web standard within established Web standards, and it is now demonstrable that most Web sites are not standards-compliant. Zoom layouts remain a tool that can be used by smart developers.

I have come to be convinced that a really optimal design includes not merely reverse type (dark on light) but “positive” type, for want of a better word (light on dark). Why? Some people with learning disabilities prefer it, as do some low-vision people.

I also think you could use a single navigation column and another column for content with little trouble, at least according to the almost-completely-unnoticed research by one’s esteemed colleagues Alastair Campbell and Léonie Watson. (Other research and tools: Faruk Ateş, Jeremy Keith, Jemaleddin JOE HATES DYSLEXICS ASPERGERIANS Cole.)

So it looks like my original formulation (inspired by Aries Arditi, who, to this day, refuses to respond to E-mails or contribute in any way to a discussion he started in the first place) was most of the way there, but not all the way. And it looks like zoom layouts can no longer be a simple toggle; you have to give people a range of choices. There goes the frosty, mentholated, hyper-rigorous minimalist IC-Style page design you cherished so much.

Designers have nonetheless produced rather nice single-column, giant-font layouts – Headscape, for example, and Glaucoma.org, a brilliant design by Mule, replete with humorous touches, like stars in the night sky in the reverse-type layout. (Additional props for using Fairplex as display font.)

Other examples?

This is going to take a while to catch on, if it ever does. And WCAG 2 is an impediment, as will be documented in due course.

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.04 15:24. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/04/zlu/

(Values you enter are stored and may be published)

  

Information

This personal Weblog is unlikely to be updated again until my next book comes out. (See Best postings)

Archives by category

Archives by date

Just add /year/month/day/ to the end of site’s URL, blog.fawny.org. You can add just /year/month/, or just /year/, if you wish. Years are four-digit, month and day two-digit (with padding zero below 10). For example:

Copyright © 2004–2023

You enjoy fawny.blog

Transgenderism is to be opposed categorically