. . . muttered the ogre

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.)

Changed my mind: I won’t ask to have my blog rated at HotOrNot, since I’m unwilling to give a numeric rating to those I see there. How do you quantify a subjective impression? But I’ll keep it bookmarked, for days when I’m desperate for a new blog to read! (2004 Oct 22: Yeah, like that’ll happen. I try halfheartedly to keep up with 46 blogs, and have 417 entries on a “get back to it eventually” list.)

Recent reading: Gene Expression; The Kolkata Libertarian; IBM Research’s puzzle of the month; Follies and Folly Towers, Monuments and Obelisks; Science News, the web version of the weekly magazine; How Stuff Works: Articles of the Day; BBC News sci/tech; Designing a Baseball Cover; Forgotten New York, curious corners of a city I’ve never visited; Duct Tape Fashion Gallery