I am haunted by two mysteries of the modern (p)age. Well, more like unexplained inconveniences. If anyone can solve them or explain why it is so, I would be thrilled. Or even if you think I'm off base or just the hundredth millionth person to mention it.
1) Text size on webpages. Everything else is working swimmingly. We've come a long way. Web pages look fantastic. And at widescreen 1200x800 or whatever it is, so much information can be displayed. But every month, text size seems to be shrinking. I know it's not my eyesight. But it will be my eyesight if it keeps up. It is going to be something like 4 point Arial in another year. Maybe it's an adjunct to Moore's Law.
(It seems to be one of those phenomena, like the multiple layers of scrolling horizontal text at the bottom of news broadcasts that threaten to "drown" the anchorperson like so much rising water.)
The text size is often hardcoded into the webpage and is thus immune to attempts to use the browser menu option of decreasing or increasing text size. "Make text larger" only works on like 20% of webpages these days, by my reckoning.
Isn't it odd that everything else can be modified and adjusted but not the CSS? Or am I missing something?
(Of course the Mac has a built in zoom in function so that provides some relief.)
2) I can't read web pages offline.
Fictional example from our road trip. I have just parked in front of a Comfort Inn in Pohunk, Wyoming, and downloaded an incredibly important piece of information in Explorer over the free WiFi. When the manager runs out shaking his fist and yelling "Freeloader!" (fictional, as I said), I drive away and out of range. But I have accidentally closed the browser window. I go back to the page, yet it won't load anymore. I scour the cache in Windows Explorer. Nothing. No such file.
Hell, back in 1994 I was able to specify, in Internet options, "never check if page is updated". Why not now?
I understand that a lot of applications (the autosave in this very Blogger interface, gmail) rely on consantly being online. But is there no way to override this?
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3 comments:
Use Firefox - then you can resize the text of any webpage.
I don't have an answer to point 2.
I had forgotten about Firefox :)...I used to use it when I had a PC but then some spyware got past the defences. And I remember there was some problem viewing pdfs in the browser... On balance, though, a good progamme, I might give it another go. Thx.
1) Opera ftw.
2) In 1994, everything was static HTML. Today, everything is PHP or other dynamic scripts, and the page is different every microsecond.
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