OT: HTML and email styles (was Re: Detecting End-of-File using READLINE command)

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>About time for a subject change after most of this has gone under a false
>pretense for a day now.
>
...
>95% of all statistics are made up.  "Fact" is a wee might strong a term to
>stamp on that, to boot.  So is "loves".  And of those that tolerate-to-like
>HTML, nobody that has seen the internal results and has a clue likes the
>HTML generated by M$ products, which is usually guaranteed to be bloated
>by up to 93%.  I've literally worked on a 23K HTML document generated by
>FrontPage, and when stripped of all the crap that wasn't needed in order to
>gain the same appearance (adding nothing as an alternative...just trimming
>cruft), got the filesize down to 1.7K.
....

Most of the stuff removed has to do with fixing fonts, and trying to make
the web page look like it does on the designer's screen (e.g. putting <br>
at the end of lines of a paragraph instead of letting it wrap properly).  I
have yet to find a web editing program other than vi/vim that doesn't
insert font information in the output.  The only appropriate font
specifications in HTML are relative changes such as font="+2" where one
might want to emphasise a section.

>And font portability is a huge Pandora's Box you don't even want to open.
>Read any decent documentation on cascading style sheets for HTML or GUI
>design theory, and realise that 1) not every system even -has- the same
>fonts installed, 2) fonts render (and may also be named) differently
>between say, Mac, Windows, and X-Windows, and are just a really Bad Idea
>to hardwire because you can't guarantee how it will actually look on the
>receiving side on non-identical systems.  This is one reason locking
>fonts and font sizes on web sites is a bad idea that surpasses annoying.
>I've seen them set so small that sites are wholly unreadable without a
>magnifying glass, and my vision isn't perfect but it's not THAT bad.
>But hardwiring things like that leaves someone no room to alter it with
>the text size settings on the local end.  Add to that the facts that
>some people are colour blind, some have other vision problems, and you
>don't have to strain to read plain old console Courier like you would the
>proportional fonts with really poor kerning, and changing fonts becomes
>even less useful and appealing.

One of the original design criteria for HTML was that it be adaptable by
the user's browser to fit their screen and preferences.  One of the things
I hate is to come on pages where they've got paragraphs that don't wrap
appropriately when I increase the zoom on my browser.

I have similar problems with plain text e-mail where the writer's MUA has a
wide screen, and it generates a bad case of long/shortitis when viewed in
my 80x25 mutt window.  At least with plain text, I can pipe these through
the ``fmt'' program to clean up the message so it's readable.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Systems, Inc.
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