chiming: (Default)
Li ([personal profile] chiming) wrote in [site community profile] dw_news 2012-03-17 07:33 pm (UTC)

Usernames on DW can be up to 25 characters long, and the default font size renders as 16px for most users. Not to mention, the space also has to have room for "posting in" and then a community name, which can also be up to 25 characters long. I tried shrinking the font size, and was told that was probably a bad idea for accessibility. (Here's the custom CSS to shrink it yourself, if you like that!)

Basically, the only reason why this works on LJ is that both names are restricted to 15 characters and "posting is" isn't there (which, of course, is also bad for accessibility).

I should stress that I too have seen a million styles for DW or ported directly from an LJ style which have the username under the icon and just ignore the potential problems, but I decided it was the wrong way to go. In the end, I moved the username into only spaces that have room for the full width of the potential field.

White space is reduced quite a bit by shrinking the font size, which scales all areas of the layout too since they are sized in em. You can reduce it a little more by putting the username in your header and aligning it to the right, since it will then be 'float'ed to the same line as the timestamp.

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