New web design, font size

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

First of all, let me congratulate you with the new web design for
freebsd.org.  It is a vast improvement over the old one.


I have one or two gripes, however:

The biggest one is the default choice of font sizes:

  font-size: 69%;

Given that this really means 69% of whatever font size the user
prefers, I don't think this is such a good idea.  I grant that many
users don't know how to set the preferred font size in their browser.
But that is no excuse for making life harder for those who do.  And
I'm sure that most readers of www.freebsd.org are technically savvy
people who not only knows how, but have carefully configured their
browsers to a font size that suits them.  Please don't insult those
people by essentially telling them that 69% of their preference is
better.

That said, however, I must applaud your provision of an alternate
style sheet, mistitled "Large Text" and setting

  font-size: 93%;

which is still not what the user wanted, but close enough.

May I suggest that you make this one the default, and the other one
the alternate?  And retitle them "Normal text" and "Small text" or
something along those lines.

I could argue for pages about why this is important, but why not let
Jakob Nielsen do the arguing for me?  He does so quite eloquently:

  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020819.html

This topic shows up as the #1 design mistake in his latest Alertbox:

  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html

By the way, I think that a smaller font size is fine for menus and
lists.  69% may be overdoing it, but 80% is probably ok.  For running
text of more than a couple sentences, however, 100% should be the
default.


My second gripe is with the fixed width of the page.  This gets
annoying really fast, particularly when viewed on a laptop with a very
high resolution screen.  This is design mistake #9 in Jakob Nielsen's
list, referred to above.  So please look into ways to make the page
width variable.  It ought to be a question of setting the widths of
various design elements in percent rather than pixels.

- Harald