[thelist] Site check -- will swap for Linux browsers ;-)

Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov
Thu Aug 1 18:31:00 CDT 2002


> Still in development but someone just told me the text was *very* small?
> Shouldn't be, text is all adjustable, I think he just has his defaults
> set very low....?

I left my Linux machine at home this morning (Dell laptop running Gentoo
Linux), but you should be aware that the browser environment under Linux is
a good deal more heterogeneous than Windows. Under Windows, IE is
near-ubiquitous. Under Linux, there are a variety of browsers that each have
a respectable following -

- Konquerer [1]
- Opera
- Netscape 4.x
- Mozilla (and variants, such as Galeon)

To complicate matters further, many browsers rely on the font rendering
routines provided by XFree86[2], and these are only now reaching anything
resembling maturity. 2 years ago, it took some doing just to get TrueType
fonts to work.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that there are far more variables -- both at the
windowing system and browser level -- that affect font display on webpages
on Linux than on Windows. It's good to test your page on a few Linux
browsers if you can, but at the moment, trying to make your pages "look
right on Linux" is a goal that will likely drive you to (possibly criminal)
insanity.

As always, the best way to design your pages to be viewed on a wide number
of platforms is to ensure that they are standards-compliant; if your code
and markup are clean and your design is flexible, a Linux user will likely
have no problem viewing your site. Most Linux people are power users who
know how to adjust their own fonts. (-: Set a sensible default, use scalable
fonts, and leave it at that.

1. http://www.konquerer.org/
2. http://www.xfree86.org/

--
Jonathan McPherson, LMIT/SD&I
Software Engineer & Web Systems Analyst
email / jonathan_a_mcpherson at rl dot gov



More information about the thelist mailing list