One of the reasons Mozilla is my browser of choice is that it has a Zoom option which will always override default style settings (so I can always increase the size of my font over the will of the original designer).

I think this might be one of the grinding edges of cybertexts, particularly texts online--are we changing the nature of an online text when we adjust things like text size or font face? What about visual composition or visual rhetoric as part of the online text? Or is the very fact that the text is part of a web browser (or view through the lens/filter/apparatus of a browser), such considerations become flexible?

As a amateur web designer and a friend to many webmonkeys, sometimes composition is important. How it look is as much a part of the text as what it says (or doesn't say).

Just an interesting aside...
ED

I think we definitely change the nature of cybertexts when we start playing with font and formatting, and the effects are similar to those that occur when artists/writers/pencilers, etc. etc., do the same in comics. In fact, isn't the window it's own framed panel space, where action can occur in sequence, scrolling down or to the left or right? The window, to me, is much like the panel in a comic, the bound space where time passes and sequences are marked in the narrative.

Last semester, I was interested in seeing how folks protray the body as text in cyberspace, and it occured to me that a lot of comic theory could help work with this. The obvious things that pop into my head initially are font changes to convey emotion, size, the visual voice of a particular charater, such as is done with the figure of Morpheus in Neil Gaimon's "Sandman" series, where the pale figure of the King of Dreams is portrayed with pitch black eyes filled with endless night and a thousand stars. To match his being as the personification of Dream itself, the word balloons where the character's speech emerged were black balloons with white text, rather than the more traditional black on white bubbles. In this way, there was no doubt when Morpheus speaks, and a sense of visual voice is conveyed.

I think this is carried through in chatrooms, for instance, as folks use netspeak, vary fonts, emote, or type with a certains style and carry over an image of themselves.

DON'T WE KNOW BY NOW THAT THIS IS SHOUTING--AND THAT IT'S VERY RUDE TO BE SO LOUD AND VULGAR?

If nothing else, nettiquette on things like this certainly teach us how to deal and read text in a world where voice is active in time but not generally "heard" by the reader--unless you are rigging up a mic and speakers.

Heh, it's late, so I am not sure if this makes much sense or properly addresses your question/points, but I am bound by habit to using blog space to think off the cuff and off the top of my head--i.e., this is the type of space where I actively "think aloud", and old habits die hard.

So, yes, I think that the space and formatting of online text is definitely something to develop a dialogue about, and I, for one, am inclined to look to comics as my model.

But...I'm just a big geek. :)