Button Basics(jacojoubert.ca) |
Button Basics(jacojoubert.ca) |
I will have an eye on this, keep up the good work.
I've experienced this problem on many websites, that's why I try to avoid composite image buttons whenever possible. Either I create a button of only one image(which often can't be reused) or I create if with CSS3 (some compatibility issues).
Breaking features that paying users overwhelmingly do not use is not a showstopper for most businesses. I don't actively hate power-users, but if you're savvy enough to do anything other than open up the browser in the default settings and make with the clicky-clicky, you're savvy enough to undo it when you run into problems.
See also: "I disabled Javascript and your website broke", "I disable first-party cookies by default and your website broke", "I couldn't get your website to work on my wife's computer which I set up to run Lynx on Ubuntu Dapper" (no, really), etc.
I feel a lot worse over the related answer for disabled users, since they typically don't have an option to turn off being disabled, but the economics are the same: 100% higher development costs to improve the experience of under 1% of users is not feasible.
What I think isn't that 'the site breaks with JS off' is inherently terrible. Some sites actually do require JS - but that's far fewer than the number that think that they require JS, and completely breaking with JS off is a very distinct code smell. It says 'this person does not sweat the details.'
Also, angry geeks aren't your decision-making customers/normal users, so you're not [as likely to be] foregoing revenue with them as you are with disabled users.
I don't mean this to come off as a holier-than-thou accessibility rant, but just thought the two situations were different enough to note.
1. http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1159347929235 (pun possibly intended)
It's a tough decision where to draw the line. A purely economic decision seems soulless; accommodation of everyone will bankrupt you.
Using Camino (FF3 or FF3.5 engine, something like that) there isn't even a need to zoom in: the alignment is broken by default[0], and when zooming in the button sometimes "tears" out[1]
Stupid idea, but sadly popular.
What I would like to see, is a simple javascript api on top to generate all the nitty gritty css in the browser. That's excatly what sproutcore and sencha touch does.
It is.
I traced down the bug to a conflict in my blog's css with the buttons. Somewhere they are inheriting styles that break them. The code for the buttons on github does not have this problem.
I would love to fix this, but Camino doesn't appear to have any sort of developer tool. How are you suppose to debug things?
But anyway, lets forget about that fact for now. If you need to zoom in 400-800x on some pixels to even be able to spot the differences, then in practical terms there are no differences. You can't expect your typical visitor to sit in front of the monitor with a magnifying glass sweating at your pixel perfect buttons. Honestly, no one is going to give it much more than a glance, so attention to detail you can hardly spot with the naked eye is almost completely pointless.
Now to come back to my main point: what isn't pointless is maintaining quality when zooming in with the browser. This is something I often do myself when I'm too lazy to put my contacts in to just casually browse the web. Just about every website looks like a mess of blurry/pixelated crap when you do that. Had he just went with the css3 approach, the quality at non standard zoom levels would far outweigh the minuscule pixel details at normal zoom levels between the css3 and photoshop versions.
Anyway, that's all I really wanted to say. Had the point been that CSS3 styling was still iffy with older browsers being around and the photoshop button was superior for that reason, I wouldn't have said anything. But to dismiss it based on some differences in pixelation you wouldn't even spot normally, while ignoring that if you had actually zoomed in the browser there would be no pixelation at all with the "inferior" css3 version, was just too much.