Why do most Mainland-based websites use very small font?

[Ian_Lee]

Can anybody tell me why do most Mainland-based websites (government, university, private,......etc) like to use very small font?

Most of the time I feel headache after watching for 10 minutes.

Why can't they use larger fonts like those Taiwan and HK-based websites do?

[imron]

This frustrates me too Luckily, I use Opera, which has an auto-zoom feature for web-pages. Everytime I find myself on one of these pages, I just crank the zoom-level up to 120% an continue on my merry way.

[pazu]

And look at Sina, it's popular, but it's one of the ugliest site I've ever seen so far.

[liuzhou]

The other thing that really annoys me about so many Chinese websites, is the way every click opens into a new window! Before you know where you are you have about twenty new windows!

Why?

[pazu]

http://www.avantbrowser.com/

You should try this free browser.

[林彪]

The reason the font seems so small is that they're using GB encoding, and for some reason Internet Explorer wont let you increase the size of it. Try Mozilla Firefox instead. I have found it to be a much better replacement for Internet Explorer.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

[the__matrix]

I'm chinese,I don't think that is a problem.maybe that's a habit.I think we cannot bear the bigger font ,it will be make our site malformation.the other reason,small font can contain more information

[hparade]

i like smaller font, it give the webpage the ability to contain more content without scrolling too much, and for some reason, the characters look ugly, especially simplified, when the font is large, so that's maybe the reason why they use smaller font, hk is using smaller font now also, tw continue to use bigger font, i think it's ok to use a slighly bigger font for traditional characters, but still not too big;

for mainland sites, things that i dislike about them is that they contain too much rubbish ads and yes, those new windows and pop ups (extremely excessive compared to foreign sites), give me a break!

[Ian_Lee]

hk is using smaller font now also, tw continue to use bigger font

Not quite.

In sina.com., their Taiwan and Hong Kong websites still use bigger fonts than the Mainland website does.

Compare:

http://www.sina.com.hk/

http://www.sina.com.tw/

http://www.sina.com.cn/

[hparade]

i didn't mean hk is using the same size as cn, just smaller; (=_=")

however, the font size used in the 3 sites are very similar, with the mainland one a bit smaller; they are all considered small fonts, i remember long time ago, chinese sites used way much bigger fonts which i think were ugly;

maybe simplified can use smaller font to avoid too much "spaces"; traditional need bigger font to avoid black "blocks", just my thoughts.