Undoing the Industrial Revolution

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for November 22 is now online at:
   http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20041122.html

Summary:
The last 200 years have driven centralization and changed the human
experience in ways that conflict with evolution. The Internet will
reestablish a more balanced, decentralized lifestyle.

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The new Firefox browser has an incredibly useful feature where you can
specify that no text should be rendered smaller than a certain font size
(say, 10 points). This is a great way for users to fight back against
websites with tiny type.

Firefox also beat Bill Gates to allowing users to easily make the text
bigger or smaller, even if the website uses a frozen font size, thus
implementing my advice from 2002:
   http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020819.html

For designers this means that you need to check that your designs work
with bigger text than you may have specified. But you should check this
anyway and avoid fixed font sizes to begin with.