consumer sovereignty

If Susanna Cornett hadn’t changed hosts, I might never have read Meryl Yourish’s rant on web design:

The first standard of web publishing I learned was: The reader is in control, not you. You shouldn’t care if your readers want to completely override your backgrounds and fonts. Web publishing is all about malleability; if you can’t grasp that, you should be publishing on paper and ink. Those of you who insist on using templates that don’t allow the user to increase the font size need to find another template. You’re cheating your reader out of the control the web is supposed to bring her.

Which, friends, is why my pages have as little design as I can give them. If you’re at all like me, you’re here for the words, not the colors. (And if you’re not at all like me, why the heck are you reading this?)

Let us join hands and pray that Samizdata sees the light.

Later: Bruce Baugh is perhaps more to the point:

Folks, you really don’t know who’s reading. Some people are color-blind, and depend on contrasts in shades of gray. Some people have optic nerve damage, from multiple sclerosis or other conditions. Some are nearsighted or farsighted.

(This is on Bruce’s old site; his new site did not carry over the old archives.)