Embiggen.

Thursday 08 May, 2008

Ever have the feeling that something isn’t quite right? Like when Uncle Jim invites you to sit on his lap as he has a “surprise” for you — you know innately that there is just something wrong with that picture.

In that “something is strangely wrong” vein, here are two closely cropped example images taken from this website, a few moments apart.

fig.1 — before.

fig.2 — after.

The same site, two different text sizes. The image in fig.1 represents what IE6, IE7, FF2 and Safari 3 (tested so far) all decide is “the” size, in this case paragraph text is set to 62.5% to make EM calculations far less taxing.

It’s not just here either, in spite of my sometimes suspect code¹. Half of the Internet appears to have been up-sized. And the aberration appears to be strongest, if not a little random in EM based designs — which as any good designer will tell you is “the” sizing methodology to use for bullet-proof layouts.

So here we have yet another divergence in web “standards”. Only it doesn’t always strike. Not exactly the easiest issue to resolve.

Right now Firefox 3 users must feel like they’re viewing the internet through the bottom of a beer glass. Depending on CSS markup used, it may be larger than life. Not that that is a bad thing, given page zooming finally works. It’s just yet another different thing that has to be considered.

So, hold on to your hats ladies and gentlemen. Firefox 3 is set to up the bling and bring us a fresher, bigger Internet — but perhaps just like Uncle Jim, not quite the way we might have expected.

¹ The Lab actually validates, a rare occurrence in these parts.