[CentOS] centos product specification

Sat Sep 17 12:16:03 UTC 2011
Always Learning <centos at u61.u22.net>

On Sat, 2011-09-17 at 00:29 -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
> On 09/16/11 8:29 PM, Always Learning wrote:
> > Perhaps the Centos web site should be simple, practical, helpful in
> > preference to emulating the very latest presentation gimmicks ? A larger
> > font size will be useful for most people over 40 years of age.

> about 700 years ago, give or take a century, they invented these things 
> called 'eyeglasses' for us older folks.

Do you realise they were probably only 10 months of the year then and,
in the western world, New Year's Day was circa 1 April ? And such
luxuries as 'eye glasses' were not available to the vast majority of
people, many of whom had never heard of them.

> I'm 57, have typical age induced astigmatism and have worn bifocals 
> since I was about 45...  I use high res screens and have no trouble with 
> the centos site's readability, its fonts are the standard size for the 
> DPI I choose on my screens (typically 100dpi), with standard system 
> defaults, the centos fonts are pretty much the same size as wikipedia, 
> google searches, and nearly every other website.

Centos is a gigantic world-wide free service used on uncountable (tens?
hundreds? of) millions of machines from the latest data centre blade
servers to notebooks. Inevitably some people somewhere may not be able
to afford spectacles and High Resolution computer screens. Centos should
be about usability and accessibility, as an operating system and as
documentation including the web site.

I noticed the small size of the typeface* on www.centos.org. An
examination reveals

	div class="blockContent"

	CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution ....

A further examination reveals the font size is set in

	centercolumn

	font-size: 12px;

and it is not black

	color: #464646;
	
> I rather strongly dislike 'easy reader' pages with giant fonts, they 
> feel like they are dumbed down for 1st graders and take far too much 
> scrolling to read any significant content.

No person suggested 'easy reader' whatever that is. No person suggested
'giant fonts'. What was stated was:

	" A larger font size will be useful for most people
	over 40 years of age. "

In the context of the small, 12 PX, typeface used on www.centos.org, a
larger font size means

	13px, 14px, 15px, 16px, 17px, 18px ....... et cetera.

Thus my comment was reasonable, proportionate and sensible.

> Anyways, most every browser has a zoom function for those who refuse to 
> wear corrective lenses, often alt + and alt - ...

Readers of material in browsers should not have to routinely alter their
browser's display settings to compensate for poorly designed web sites.


-- 
With best regards,

Paul.
England,
EU.