Sorry, I was tired…

I use very large resolutions (1280×1024 as minimun and 1600×1200 normally) and I’m tired of bad designed web pages that use very small fonts, so people using big resolutions can see nothing or very small fonts. I use firefox and tried to fix this using bigger fonts on the configuration ( Edit -> Preferences -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced and changing all the fonts size there) but every configuration I use that uses the desired font size it brokes most of the pages I visit in some form (text is bigger than most CSS stuff and sometimes even text not fitting in tables too). I can provide examples and the Firefox configurations I tried if needed.

Any manner of solving this? Does WebKit suffer this annoying problem? If not… any solution in the future about this problem?

This discussion, of course, raises the question about why a smaller monospace font is desired in the first place? I’ve heard speculation about trying to fit 80 characters on the width of small monitors or trying to compensate for unequal “boldness”. My guess is that this started because web page authors expected to get about the same content on a line with proportional and monospace fonts. Sacrifice vertical equality for the approximation of horizontal equality. With lead typesetting, the answer would be to use a compressed monospace font that had the same x-height as the proportional font. Within the environment Safari executes, that’s not an option because no such font is in common use.

This isn’t just a new problem with web browsers though. Proportional fonts coming into the monospace world of computers raised similar issues before. Artificial stretching is an ugly, but effective, way this was answered (on other platforms). Need to use that proportional dingbat of a pointing finger in a run of monospaced text? Algorithmically torture the Zapf Dingbat font horizontally to keep from messing up the nice columnar monospace layout. Want to put a Visual Basic command in a run of descriptive text? Vertically stretch or shrink the monospace characters to keep the vertical similarity. This technique is ugly, but cleaning up ugliness seems to be a strong motivating factor to get people to clean up their code.

Even though your techniques are just guesses, I find them to be good ones.

PS: Is it possible to get a print stylesheet for these pages so it’s possible to print the articles neatly without having to disable the default stylesheet?