There are many issues to deal with when designing for the web, and one of the most fundamental—and seemingly hard to understand or remember—is the simple fact that the end user ultimately has control over font size, not the designer. I’ve seen many gorgeous designs that are completely untenable if the fonts are enlarged by even a single point size.

In this post, I’m going to look at a singular expression of this problem, but it should be remembered that this is just one possible example. The possibility of font resizing should be considered when designing any and every piece of a website.

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Last month, there was quite a bit of discussion around how URL shorteners are bad for the internet, and what we developers and users might be able to do to minimize the potential damage. One big idea was to use HTTP headers and rel(or revrel attribute has been called into service in other areas, namely in defining relationships between people (or to other sites you own or have a profile on), and in telling robots how to treat a link.

The first suggested solution to the short URL problem to get broad exposure was rev=”canonical”, which proposed that a page should define a “reverse” relationship to a given short URL. In other words… “You see that short url over there? well, I’m the canonical version of it, so nyah.” (In my head, web pages are full of attitude. This probably comes from years of having to physically subdue rowdy CSS.)

rev=canonical was picked up by several major sites, and has some traction. When I was looking into the issue myself, thinking about what I wanted to do for this site, I found an alternate recommendation that seemed to make more sense to me.

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