In my internet travels as of late, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by what seems to be a bad trend right now in website design–The Plague of the Tiny. In the past month or so, I’ve stumbled across more lilliputin layouts than I have ever cared to see or attempt to view and navigate. These layouts are typically 300 to 400px wide, with navigation and text all set in about what appears to be a 2px font (often non-resizable in Internet Explorer). I’m not sure who thought this was a good idea in the first place or why this is seemingly catching on like wild fire. These tiny layouts are hard to read and hard to navigate–particularly when viewed at the higher resolutions used by most monitors and screens today. Yes, Firefox and Netscape do allow for the text to be resized, but often, the layout just ends up breaking. Not to mention, approximately 90% of webusers still use IE for their browsing. I’ve heard and read all the arguments on the “get a modern browser that’s css compliant” argument, but the fact of the matter is that at the end of the day, the lion’s share are still using IE and it just seems like the nice thing to do to make sites look decent, presentable, and readable to those people too.

Another argument that comes up is that the smaller sites are prettier and more elegant. I’m not sure who came up with that idea either. There are lots of sites out there that aren’t miniscule, but are a lot of great looking, easy to navigate, and readable! (Liz’s and Veronica’s sites both come to mind at the moment as being both very attractive but user friendly.)

I’ve heard the argument as well about making sites accessible to those with lower resolutions without the horizontal scrollbar coming up. According to this site, a downright very few people are using devices that aren’t going to accomadate a layout that’s designed for 800×600. Only 0.5% of monitors still in use today use the old 640x 480. A measly 0.05% have msn-tv setup and are viewing sites at a resolution of 544×372. However, 20% are still using 800×600 and a whopping 76% now use a screen with a resolution of 1024×768 or greater!

Of course, as resolution increases, everything on the screen decreases in size–the photos, the text, the whole dang layout. So, when it comes to those itsy bitsy tiny layouts, most of the world is going to be left squinting at their screens! I’m currently on a computer with a screen resolution of 1024×768, and the text on one site I’m viewing is just down right infimantessially small. I’ve also checked out this site on my own laptop at home–1600 x 1200 resolution. It’s practially impossible to read on that one. Now, imagine the poor souls who have some of the newer screens and monitors with a resolution that has a width exceeding 2000 pixels? I’m sure it’s likely completley indeciperable to those folks. It has been predicted that over time, screen resolutions are only going to continue to increase. If this Plague of the Tiny continues as it seems to have lately, we are no longer going to be able to browse the internet.

I do admit that, in the past, I’ve been guilty of the fixed-size text thing for Internet Explorer. In my defense, that was before I learned how to build a non-breakable (or at least hard to break) css layout. I’ve been working to remedy that fixed-size thing and move on to using scalable units for font-sizes. I’ll admit that the keywords thing (small, x-small, large, etc.) is pretty limiting and that whole thing with em’s is kind of wacky, but percentages are quite lovely. As a designer, you can have lots of control over what the initial font-size is, but if some poor soul out there doesn’t want to have to squint and they only have IE, then they can resize the text at least. I figure it’s the least I can do. I don’t want to make anyone go blind while trying to read one of my sites.