PC Magazine author John C. Dvorak, whose work I enjoy thoroughly, threw the proverbial boomerang stone today in his column AJAX and the Road to Bad Web Sites, where he criticized a web site:
Holy crap! The Web site usctrojans.cstv.com is far worse than the football team. I’m not sure what they are hoping to accomplish with a site like this, but if you want to see the site at its worst, use Firefox and make the text two sizes bigger by hitting Ctrl+ twice. That way you can see the problem with Web sites that use AJAX.
Dvorak is correct in his statement, and his statement came right back to haunt him. Compare the two images below. The first is a screenshot of his column as viewed without any font size changes; the second is a screenshot of his column after hitting Ctrl+ twice to increase font size.
Screenshot of Dvorak’s column (normal font size)
Screenshot of Dvorak’s column (large font size)
I know how important advertising is to PC Magazine, but increasing the font size caused the ad to appear twice, and covered some of the text of the article. Let’s hope their web designers read Dvorak’s article, too.