Conversation

Okay, I'm gonna rant a moment here because I am really utterly bewildered by the choices I see in a lot of website construction.

Why is everyone hard coding font sizes on websites? Like, while I'm irked by the choice to set font size in pixels, if they only set the starting font size in pixels and everything else was something that was relative to OG size, it would be fine.

Like, set your body font size to 12px for all I care. (You must have eyes like an eagle for this to be a functional font size, but what the fuck ever.) But if you're also setting your headings, your various secondary texts, etc etc in pixels instead of relative that size, suddenly if someone needs to scale your page for legibility because you're working with fonts designed for ants, they have to over ride a bajillion different classes and shit, or they have to use the browser zoom which is a crap shoot on quickly that'll break because you also set your containers and columns and shit in pixels too, right? But you don't care, because you just want to lay this shit out like it's a fucking static print page, don't you?

Look, I worked in print. I miss parts of it, other parts I don't, but let me tell you one fucking huge thing I do not miss with print: it is static. Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes that's good enough. But there are plenty of reasons why dynamic is winning out over print these days. Being able to update your docs if your product changes is helpful, being able to make your page accessible with large type by changing one fucking value in your stylesheet is amazing. But when you set your font sizes at every level of your fucking page, and don't design so that shit adjusts when the font scales, your shit breaks if anyone wants to read it and they can't read font sizes made for ants.

Why the fuck are people doing this shit? Why the hell is it normal and fucking default for people to set fonts like this? It should be best fucking standard practice for you to set your font size once and scale it for every other fucking part of the page.

Please, can anyone explain this to me, other than maybe it's just that the print designers who lost their jobs trying to transfer their outdated education directly to web design being the teachers of the latest generation of web designers?