Browser alert: Bullets
FF1.5 places the bullet smack on the baseline while Opera 9.2 places it about 2 pixels higher, making it look like a superscript. It wouldn't matter if my font size were bigger than 11px. This means that, for it to look just right in Opera, my bullet image shouldn't be more than 7 pixels tall.
Right.
This being as good a time for lists as any, here are the Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005, according to Jakob Nielsen (a.k.a. "the king of usability"):
- Legibility problems
- Non-standard links
- Flash
- Content that's not written for the web
- Bad search
- Browser incompatibility
- Cumbersome forms
- No contact information or other company info
- Frozen layouts with fixed page widths
- Inadequate photo enlargement
If you check out his site, you'll see that he really does practice what he preaches but... I don't think I want my site to look anything like his. The font size and leading--isn't leading a big part of legibility?--make my brain bleed rather. But his picture's nice. :)
Seriously, I agree with all his calls although some of them don't apply to me. His observations on forms and company info are obviously meant for corporate sites. But even before I read this, I was already a little paranoid about browser incompatibility and layouts that break on other specs. As for fonts, I prefer them small because they're more like books to me that way. Ditto with the "content that's not written for the web". "Short, scannable, and to the point" have their virtues but it's not as if I were a salesperson with just five seconds to make my pitch before the door gets slammed in my face.
But what makes me happy is that I have found an ally in my aversion for Flash. I try--really, I do!--to find Flash-y sites to like. But after the initial amusement, the wiggly things just get irritating. And that's with broadband; before broadband, I avoided them like the plague. What's worse than finding that there's nothing worthwhile behind some slow-loading splash page than having to look at some spelling error permanently etched on something brazenly shiny? (There used to be gazillions such in the Philweavers site that I haven't had the stomach to go back.)
But the biggest reason why I don't like Flash is its black box-ness. If all sites had been made with Flash way back then, I wouldn't have learned how to DIY them. In short: FLASH IS SO NOT PUNK ROCK.
