Can somebody please explain to me WTF is going on with the current (usually CSS) fad of minuscule text and acres of wasted horizontal screen real estate? I know that few readers want to scroll horizontally (I’m one of them), but facrissake, is it absolutely necessary to do THIS?

I suck at CSS. Always have; I started to learn it and decided that there were better ways to spend my time than learning a skill that I did not enjoy and would probably never use. That said, I know basically how it works, and I know that at some point in time, someone decided that the column width for this article (which was fairly interesting, if in dire need of text magnification) should look like an erect penis sticking up in the middle of an otherwise blank page. To be fair, there may be advertising on either side of this, but my industrial-strength hosts file, AdBlock Plus/Filterset.G and NoScript mean that I don’t see much advertising at all. No loss to advertisers; their blinking, flashing crap would just piss me off and I wouldn’t buy their products anyway. Still this bullshit makes me glad I’ve never coughed up the cash for a giant WS monitor; this is a maximised FF window on an ordinary 17″ flat panel with the resolution set at 1280×1024. I have no trouble with 12pt text, but these days, I’m pretty sure that roughly 50% of web sites are using 3pt.
Attention, dumbasses: It’s nice to code for people who use lower screen resolutions, but I can assure you that the vast majority of visitors to your site are NOT using a screen resolution of 800×600 on a 14″ monitor. 1. Stop making text so fucking small that I have to hit Ctrl+ three times just to see that it is indeed in English. 2. Stop wasting my horizontal screen space by setting the text in columns approximately four pixels wide.

I hadn’t done it since I upgraded to Feisty, but I guess it’s time to set the minimum font size in FF. This is one web trend that I hope goes out of fashion in a big fucking hurry. Maddox may be an abrasive bastard, but he’s got the right idea.