Author Topic: Font size  (Read 22429 times)

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Offline Revned

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Font size
« on: November 02, 2006, 11:41:08 am »
Is it just me, or is the font on the system pages considerably bigger than it was before the bandwidth ran out? Now with this large font and the super wide tables, it looks like my monitor is zoomed in on the real page.

Offline JonLeung

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RE: Font size
« Reply #1 on: November 02, 2006, 12:26:11 pm »
As I said, I took the time off to optimize the site a little bit.



The remaining non-animated .GIFs have been changed to .PNGs.  But what really should save on bandwidth is the clean up of the HTML code.



When I started using Microsoft FrontPage, I was frustrated by the font constantly reverting back to Times New Roman.  So I hit "Ctrl+A" to select all of the text and specified the Arial font as well as size.  What this unfortunately did was that it put font code for every single cell in every single table, ballooning the size of each HTML by a ton!  Imagine...hundreds more "<font face="Arial" size=1>" than necessary!



So I took some time earlier this week to clean up the HTML code (thankfully Microsoft FrontPage made it pretty easy - as it should since it was its fault to begin with).  I also found some code anomalies and inconsistencies that would probably muck up how they are viewed in different browsers.  But the biggest size reduction came from the extraneous font tags - which saves the Super NES page nearly half a meg.  HALF A MB.  Imagine...for every thousand or so viewers, I'd save about a whole GB.  And the big directory was shaved down by 44 kB, which would add up to be big bandwidth savings considering how many times it's accessed.



Not only should I save on bandwidth and have a speedier site, but I feel much better knowing that the site is "cleaner".



So to answer your question, I decided to let the font all be the default size instead of specifying it for every table on the pages.  And the default size is smaller than what I used to use.

Offline Revned

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RE: Font size
« Reply #2 on: November 02, 2006, 02:00:13 pm »
If it's default, then why is it bigger than the text on every other website? Every time I visit the index pages I have to manually tell my browser to make it smaller. You know, you can adjust things without having to do tags for each and every cell. A simple CSS file can set the text style for every page on your site without bloating the files at all. As it is now, it looks pretty bad to me.

Offline marioman

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RE: Font size
« Reply #3 on: November 02, 2006, 03:42:39 pm »
Revned Said:
If it's default, then why is it bigger than the text on every other website? Every time I visit the index pages I have to manually tell my browser to make it smaller. You know, you can adjust things without having to do tags for each and every cell. A simple CSS file can set the text style for every page on your site without bloating the files at all. As it is now, it looks pretty bad to me.

Agreed.  I think that it is a little large.  A text size change would be nice.

Offline bustin98

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RE: Font size
« Reply #4 on: November 02, 2006, 08:53:11 pm »
As long as Jon doesn't mind, I can take a quick look at what he did and see if I can't assist with the optimization of the pages. But what do you mean by system pages? I took a tour around the site and the Review page has some large font, but the list of games seems pretty small to me.



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Offline Revned

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RE: Font size
« Reply #5 on: November 02, 2006, 08:55:06 pm »
The NES page, the SNES page, etc. Now that you mentioned it, the master index does look super-small....

Offline bustin98

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RE: Font size
« Reply #6 on: November 02, 2006, 11:23:08 pm »
You replied too quickly. I took another look and found what you were talking about.

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Offline Revned

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RE: Font size
« Reply #7 on: November 05, 2006, 08:21:34 pm »
Jon, are you going to pursue this further, or should I just try to live with it?

Offline JonLeung

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RE: Font size
« Reply #8 on: November 05, 2006, 08:47:31 pm »
Send me a screenshot of how you see it in your Mac browser.



The way it looks in IE is fine with me.  But I looked at it in another browser (Firefox, I think) and I notice that it doesn't carry the font tag through, so it reverts to Times New Roman instead of remaining in Arial.  How stupid.



Unless it's unbearably atrocious, I have other things on my plate I should get to first.

Offline Revned

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RE: Font size
« Reply #9 on: November 05, 2006, 09:08:16 pm »
You act like this would take ages to correct (not to mention like it doesn't matter because again, being a Mac user, I'm a minority), but like I said, a simple CSS file can do it all for you. It's a 10 minute task.



Here is the big font:

User posted image



The little one:

User posted image



And for comparison, the size I'm used to:

User posted image



And IE is not the best browser to test things on. Actually, it's probably the worst choice. IE does the stupidest things with code.

Offline JonLeung

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RE: Font size
« Reply #10 on: November 06, 2006, 12:46:18 pm »
It's really hard to even mention that you're a Mac user without it possibly sounding negative.  >_<  I don't use a Mac, so I can't see exactly how you see, so how else can I say "show me how your Mac browser shows it"?  It's not like I said it in italics, like "show me how your Mac browser shows it"...now that would be unnecessary emphasis and more likely to be insulting or something.



Fine, I'll look into the CSS thing (look, I only learn what things are as I encounter them, as bad as that sounds) but even so, I don't think I'll necessarily change things to how you might like.



For example, the directory with the small text?  I've always seen it that way.  To change it "back" would be, well, to me it'd be no different and I think it's best that way.



And this is not a knock on your personal opinion, but I'm not sure how the text in the table qualifies as "too big".  It's not like it's hard to read or crowding up the table.  I thought that larger text would be better since I enlarged the tables earlier.



I'm sure I sometimes come off as stubborn.  >_<

Offline Revned

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RE: Font size
« Reply #11 on: November 06, 2006, 01:13:24 pm »
But the fact that you even mentioned it when I was not the only one who noticed it made it seem like you were pointing it out to make a statement. Sorry, I just get annoyed in general when people act uncaring because something doesn't affect them.



I don't know CSS either, but I was able to quickly whip one up after a few Google searches for a page I made awhile back.



It's certainly readable, but I don't think there should be such a discrepancy between pages on your site. The system pages are probably 4-6 points bigger than the master index. That, and I've been visiting this site for years and I'm so used to the old look that it jumps right out at me. I'm a minimalist, and stuff like this just seems obnoxious to me.

Offline bustin98

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RE: Font size
« Reply #12 on: November 09, 2006, 08:08:38 am »
I've taken the page and started optimizing it.



What a task. MS WORD is not the best web page maker, though I'm sure it was easy.



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Offline JonLeung

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RE: Font size
« Reply #13 on: November 09, 2006, 08:55:03 am »
I started with Microsoft Word, but after I started using FrontPage, I would've figured any traces of Word would've been gone (FrontPage certainly added a lot of its own quirks).



I'm concerned about optimizing for the Wii's Opera browser.  VGMaps.com, with its rounded-corner front page window-like buttons sure look like it'll fit right in with the Wii's Channel interface.

Offline bustin98

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RE: Font size
« Reply #14 on: November 09, 2006, 11:14:24 am »
I was wondering why there were tags using all capitals, then others using lower case.



There are a number of errors and I'm going to go through it line by line. And thats currently 4613 lines of code. But when I'm done it should be down to around 2000.



And I wouldn't be too concerned with how the Wii will display pages. Opera is a standards compliant browser, and I am making this page at least standard compliant (cause it sure ain't at the moment).



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