Comments on: Day 3: Web pages preferences

By: TjL (tntluoma.com)

TjL (tntluoma.com) — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 02:43:41 +0000

Chris: it's a great debate, of course, almost religious.

The web has broken all the expectations. In no other medium do you expect to be able to set your own preferences.

As long as it's readable and flexible enough, and you can always override them, I don't see why page authors can't make their preferences known.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:50:14 +0000

I would never specify a particular font for my web pages. It's rude. If the client specified their monospace font to be 3px Draconian bold italic, then that's their choice. And what happens when I ask for Garamond and the client doesn't have that installed?

I specify font families, but no more than that. Likewise, it's best to specify font size as a percentage, not an absolute value.

Anyway, decent web developers will only specify families, so if you want to change the font associated with a family, that will be effective. Personally, I choose Gentium as the default serif font, and guess what font I get, everywhere I go?

By: killy

killy — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 03:57:41 +0000

One little thing. If you type the zoom in the zoom box, the number will be rounded to the next predefined value. So, you can’t really set it to whatever you want (not that the difference between 110% and 115% is really important…)

By: TjL (tntluoma.com)

TjL (tntluoma.com) — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:01:36 +0000

Jeff - If you press the eyeglasses icon (at the far right of the addressbar in the default setup of Opera8) it will reveal a dropdown toolbar (which I call the "Eye Bar")

There it will show the Author Mode, Image Mode, and Fit to Width mode, as well as the zoom level.

Hope that helps.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 20:52:09 +0000

Thanks for sharing this wonderful paper!

Is there somewhere to show the current image option? I read this and tried shift+i for several times, so that I lost where I am...:)

thanks.

By: TjL

TjL — Sat, 21 May 2005 18:12:03 +0000

yes that makes sense since shift+i would just make a capital I in an input field.

You can also press F9 to put focus on the page instead of the field.

By: George

George — Sat, 21 May 2005 09:56:57 +0000

I found Shift+I doesn’t work if cursor is in the edit field on the web page. Changing this shortcut to Alt+Shift+I solved the problem.

By: Kutyin

Kutyin — Sun, 15 May 2005 22:11:49 +0000

Hello, Timothy! Nice work!

'Preferred fonts and colors' may be of help when you come across a page that doesn't define some of font properties in a stylesheet. For example, when font-family is not set, the browser replaces it with the default font, which in most cases will be the awful Times New Roman. Such shortcoming is pretty widespread, even today when every page has a CSS. User/Author mode means switching the whole stylesheet, which will certainly make the page look the way you want it, but it will break the page design as well.

The same applies to link colors: although a decent page must define them in the stylesheet, there are pages that don't, and your browser would display those ugly colors. Makes me remember Windows 95 >(

By: al dasman

al dasman — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 05:00:51 +0000

“Summary: Opera’s image and zoom controls make it easier to use any other browser.” - man you got me here, —- how in the world can Opera’s image and zoom controls make it easier for me to use any other browser. There must be some magic going on here…. What other amazing feats does Opera do? You got my attention!!

{{Oops! You spotted a typo. I left out the word “than”. Fixed now. Thanks — TjL}}

By: msp_01

msp_01 — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 20:10:06 +0000

i'd like to give it a try.

{{ If you want to try Opera, click on the "Get Opera 8" icon -- TjL }}