Tuesday, April 18, 2006

A matter of scale

I like my fonts when viewing websites to be a certain somewhat large size. When I switch to sites that have their own idea of what size fonts should be, I'm cranking on the font size + keypresses. This is one of the rare spots where Internet Explorer is marginally better than Firefox with its font size toolbar button, but who decided it was a good idea to allow websites to set absolute font sizes?

A similar situation comes up when listening to music files, and sound in applications in general. Some files are encoded much more quieter than others, not to mention the separate volume controls for wave type files and MIDI files. I can be listening to a quietly encoded song and some notification will chime loudly. Some songs are supposed to be a little quieter than others, so normalizing all the songs is not without flaws, not to mention, which sound level should I normalize to, and what distortions will that cause in lossy formats such as MP3?

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