Seriously? One of the most important aspects of your design, and you want to leave it up to the browser? Web design is 95% typography. If your website doesn't specify a font you aren't doing your job as a designer.
Most websites need a lot less design than they have. There are properties that, for branding or other reasons, need to exert full control of their look and feel that need strong design, but most websites don't, and over-design gets in the way of disseminating information to users.
> If your website doesn't specify a font you aren't doing your job as a designer.
Not every website needs anyone doing a job as a designer. There certainly are very important places for design on the web, but the web as a whole is an information dissemination platform, not a full employment program for graphic designers.
I wish there were a good specific word for what you're referring to as 'design'. It's very prevalent, and in most cases it's actually a great example of poor design.
I don't think we are. We just have different opinions about the need for it.
> To me, design is all about disseminating information to users.
Design is about presentation of information to users, not dissemination.
> That's why designers should care so much about typography - readability is absolutely key to a good design.
Readability is subjective and not essential to dissemination; design is about controlling presentation, rather than leaving it to system through which the user accesses the information. For information that doesn't have specialized presentation needs, this will make the presentation worse for people that have their defaults well tuned for themselves in the name of making it better-than-untuned-results (ideally) for the average user.
> I wish there were a good specific word for what you're referring to as 'design'.
There is. "Design".
It sounds like you think the web should be a collection of RSS feeds and APIs. That's interesting and all, but that's not even remotely what the web is. The system through which the user accesses web information (aka browser) is only well-tuned for a very small minority of users, because the vast majority don't even know that they can tune their browser, let alone think that they should. Further, I've never seen a browser where the defaults make for excellent readability. In every case I've seen, they don't even make for acceptable readability.
> There is. "Design".
Appreciate the snark, but I was talking about a specific word for what I understood you to be talking about. Design is the exact opposite of a specific word. It's so general as to be downright vague. (Also, since you said you didn't think we were talking about different things, this comment really isn't useful.)
Yes, it is.
> Small font sizes, low contrast, bad kerning, and many other things objectively decrease readability.
There are elements of design which affect readability more consistently across individual users than other elements of design do, but that doesn't stop readability from being subjective.
I am fine with the usual serif, sans-serif, monospace etc. declarations, but I think that it should be left to the user/webbrowser to decide which particular serif font they prefer, as it is the user that has to read the text set in this font.
That's why VIM is not MS Word.
Exactly. The browser/OS vendors make these default choices.
And of course you want to use different type depending on whether you’re typesetting a header, navigation or paragraph. That’s what serif, sans-serif, monospace and even cursive and fantasy are for. You tell the browser which general family you would like to have in a particular place, and the browser/user then chooses the best family from this set depending on their device, font rendering settings etc. etc. (If you are seriously suggesting to use one serif type for the header, another serif type for the body and a third serif type for bullet point lists all on the same page I will have a hard time not trying to violate your physical integrity).
Furthermore, it is obviously important not to cram too many characters in a single line. However, if one font at a given size (which, again, you should only specify relatively to the browser’s default size) manages to fill a line with as little as fifty characters, another font will have a hard time filling that same line with considerably more than 70 – both of which are perfectly fine line lengths.
Again, I am not saying that CSS is evil and that you shouldn’t use it. I am saying that you should leave things to the browser that are best left to the browser.
(One minor point — type is much more than just font-family, as your second paragraph seems to assume.)
...But that's the point of the WWW. You don't know what resolution or browser or OS the user has. You don't know if they even have a screen.
I know I lost this argument sometime in 2004, but it'd be nice if people stopped trying to control where everything goes.
I know I lost this argument sometime in 2004, but it'd be nice
if people stopped trying to control where everything goes.
I never was able to determine if the decrease in the amount of these questions during the early 2000s was due to the decreasing popularity of Usenet or the increasing popularity of Flash.