Web design fail 002

My Thinkpad X60s has a 12 inch screen, in 4:3 aspect ratio instead of that newfangled skinny ratio, and I run X at a resolution of 1024 x 768. This is probably a bit of an old fashioned combination these days, but I don't think it's ridiculous for me to expect the web to basically work without issues on this machine.

For the most part it does, and I'm grateful for that. But at least once a month I do run into a website that just does not work on this combination of screen size and resolution - text flows off the edge of the screen, or something like that. I've even seen this happen on Facebook, which is presumably developed by pretty savvy people. The impact of this kind of problem can range from minor annoyance to pretty severe, if essential control elements for some web app are inaccessible.

Of course, it sucks that there are people making websites which basically make compatibility conditional not on your browser, or your OS, or how much CPU or RAM you have, but on the age of your monitor. However, in my opinion it sucks even more that these kinds of bugs are even possible in principle. CSS is simply far too expressive and powerful a formatting system for the vast majority of websites. The combined power of CSS and JS are largely enabling the use of the web browser as a platform-independent development environment, and obviously that can deliver some really cool things. But most webpages are still documents (at least for now), which is exactly how things should be. And for genuine documents, the formatting system shouldn't be flexible enough to allow text to run off the screen under any circumstances, because there really is no legitimate need for that kind of control in typical documents. People are supposed to be able to read documents. If you need to do something like position text with pixel-precision and possibly partially off-screen, you're not really making a document anymore, you're making an application or a work of art, and its only reasonable to expect that those sorts of things should require the use of a different set of technological tools than documents.

I probably come across in this as some grumpy old stoic who would be happy if all websites were completely unstyled black-on-white text, but that's not really true. I understand that it's nice for a website to look good and I don't begrudge anybody wanting to make sure their website is pleasant looking. But I also think it goes without saying that content is more important than form by a large margin, and whatever tools we use to make websites pretty should be constrained in power so as to interfere minimally with the web being simple, fast, reliable, secure and very widely compatible.