164852 - hp.com - Page appearance is virtually unreadable - fonts too small

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Nate Goldshlag]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

This page has fonts that are way too small.  I have my serif font set to New
Century, sans serif to Helvetica, tried 72 and 96 dpi to no effect, I allow
pages to set their own fonts.  The page looks just fine in MSIE 5.1.5 on the
Macintosh.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to the website
2. Look
3.

Actual Results:  
Fonts were too small to read.

Expected Results:  
Rendered page readable

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

the site has:

td { font-size: 75% } 

in the stylesheet.  Then it uses tables for layout.  So any text you see is at
least three levels of table nesting in.  0.75^3 is about 0.5 at best.  So the
font you see should be about half the size of your "default" font...

Over to evangelism.

Comment 2

[Felix Miata]

That page is an absurdly poor design, but not unlike many on the web today. I
don't think there is anything within Mozilla to do about such things, and even
Tech Evan isn't really appropriate (AFAICT) except maybe to point out the page
is designed badly, and provide some pointers that explain why.

How do the owners and drivers of Tech Evan bugs handle them? Do they need help?
I created my own page mostly to exemplify poor design
<http://members.ij.net/mrmazda/junk/annoy.html>, but also to provide links to
sites that explain good and bad, such as:

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, August 19, 2002: "Let Users Control Font Size"
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020819.html>
Todd Fahrner's "Font size analogy": <http://css.nu/articles/font-analogy.html>
Layout Master page layout editor 's "Web Pages aren't Printed on Paper":
<http://www.westciv.com/style_master/house/good_oil/not_paper/>
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, April 28, 2002: "Usability for Senior Citizens":
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020428.html>

and more.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Help is always nice.  Just mailing the web page's maintainer and pointing out
the problem and the solution is a good step.  See
http://mozilla-evangelism.bclary.com/howtohelp.html for more information on
helping out with evangelism...

Comment 4

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

tech evang june 2003 reorg

Comment 5

[Felix Miata]

td { font-size: 75% } has been removed, replaced by td { font-size: 12px }. Much
is styled { font-size: 11px }. It's no longer as bad as it was, but certainly
not useful at 1600x1200 without using zoom or setting a minimum font size in prefs.

Comment 6

[u63580]

Looks not too bad now - is this still a problem?

Comment 7

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

seems fine to me as well. -> fixed.