If you spend a lot of time reading information on Web pages, you may be quietly disgruntled by the increasingly popular use of tiny text. Apparently this shrinking of text is an exciting new thing among Web designers. ("Hey dude, check out this tiny text on the awesome black background; it's really, really cool!")
Coolness factor notwithstanding, if your eyes aren't what they used to be, this trend may be the source of big eye strain. However, depending on how the Web page was created, you may be able to give your eyes a break by changing the default text size in your browser. It's easy to do.
In Internet Explorer versions 5 and 6, choose View|Text size and select an option from the pop-up list. You can choose from Largest, Large, Medium, Small and Smaller. The default setting is Medium.
In Netscape, the settings are buried a little more deeply. Choose Edit|Preferences and you see a dialog box with two panes. On the left side, click Fonts. Next to Variable Width font, you see a drop-down box where you can change the size (the default is 12 points).
The bad news is that even if you change your view settings, it may not affect a lot of the Web pages you visit while you are surfing around the 'Net. HTML is the language that is used to create Web pages and you can specify font sizes in HTML in a couple of different ways. So some sites may be affected by your browser preferences, but some won't be, depending on how the Web designer wrote the HTML that makes up the page.
Another point to consider is that many designers often use graphics for text, so they can control the appearance completely. You may have encountered sites that are actually nothing but a bunch of pictures slapped on a page. These types of sites tend to take a long time to download, and because the words on the page aren't understood as text by the browser, they are unaffected by any changes to your text viewing options.
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