Dear web: Please make your type larger

I'm in my late 30s now. I have been using computers (on and off) since 1978, from an Apple 2 at a summer camp, to a MicroVideo Interact at home, and an Apple 2e which I used to pull myself up to a C in Physics at my high school.

I progressed to PCs in college and a Mac later, using PS/2s at IBM. In all, just under twenty years using CRTs for display. Some time in the late 1990s I switched to a laptop as my primary computer and am now on my third personal Thinkpad (I lost count of how many I raced through at IBM, I averaged one every ten months).

Laptops don't use CRTs, they use LCDs. The key difference being that instead of having electrons beamed at your eyes at lightspeed from a ray gun, instead they're emitted from flourescent lights behind the LCD screen (the LCD acts as a filter).

Now, I'm not an optometrist, and I concede that this may just be the effect of, ergh, getting old, but I'm convinced that the constant flicker of the LCD is causing my eyes to wig out.

Wig out being a technical term for: I find it increasingly difficult to read many web pages that tweak the font size for body copy down to 10 points. I'm constantly hitting Control-+ (in Firefox) to kick up the font size a couple of points, and this is with my reading glasses on.

Now, I go to the optometrist every year and every year he insists that my eyes are fine. My distance prescription has barely budged in ten years, my reading prescription degrades a little bit but I can still use my glasses from five years ago (if it were not for Frisket having used them as a chew toy).

Maybe it's a factor of the resolution of the LCD, maybe it's due to the flicker of the lights behind the LCD, maybe it's my eyes or age, I don't know. I do know that I'm justthisclose to using a user-stylesheet to override the font sizes even though that will likely screw up the layout that someone has labored over for days.