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Especially on some older sites and legacy pages, it's amazing to see how often the appearance is unintentionally left to default - and this is true all over the web, not just on my pages.
I've set the default to Engraver's Gothic, which uses small caps for lower case so problem areas really pop out. My default font color is green, and the background color is gray.
It's very easy to overlook some element or other that you meant to control with a stylesheet (such as lists!) As a surfer, I had my fonts and colors set to what I liked - and that was often the way I wrote pages too. Unfortunately, then, omissions may be invisible during testing.
I highly recommend this, even if you go back to something more eye-pleasing after your testing is done.
What's worse, is some of them can store the font info in a registry key and will survive between installs.
What's worse, is some of them can store the font info in a registry key and will survive between installs.
I didn't know that!
I'm pretty sure that IE installs with a default of Times New Roman, black, medium (which I believe is 12pt), with white as a background color.
But I will also admit to being a bit of a control freak. When I write a page I don't like to let the user casually override my settings. I especially don't like to accidentally revert to their defaults. It's OK when I intentionally allow that, but I want it to be conscious and not accidental.
I also use pixel sized fonts (relatively generous sizes for older eyes) and not relative sizing that depends on browser settings. I would like to experiment with ems, but that gets too crazy cross-browser.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to get into an "!important" style war, because I figure that anyone who writes their own stylesheet must have good reasons.
I'm in a similar place with liquid layouts, I use them sparingly. I will sometimes use a liquid div, but I'm not happy about the readability of a 1600 pixel wide line of text so I always set a max-width.
I'm not happy about the readability of a 1600 pixel wide line of text so I always set a max-width.Ah, that old chestnut. I think it depends on your audience; few people have their screens set to that resolution, those that do usually don't maximize their browser windows. It's probably not a huge problem, but if your audience is likely to consist mainly of graphic designers, something to seriously consider.
I know someone whose job it is to answer questions on a web hosts' tech support bulletin board. A common question is "Why is my page blank?" and it usually turns out to be the following problem:
1. Designer decides to use white text on a dark background.
2. Designer creates a "cool" image for the background.
3. Designer doesn't bother setting a background colour to match.
4. Designer uploads.
5. Designer tests. For some reason, the background image fails to download. (Usually designer doesn't know what "case sensitive" means.)
6. Designer complains that page is blank, and when is *****.net going to fix their servers? (We're talking newbies here.)
My acquaintence has encountered this problem so many times that she's defined her default background colour as light blue; so at least she can tell at a glance whether it's a stylesheet problem or a closing-table-tag-missing problem.
