RE:Re[2]: Netscape & New HTML

In article of 11:05 PM 10/27/94, "Sheerin, Peter" <psheerin@mfi.c writes:
>     Ok, now what the devil is Lynx supposed to do when it runs into 
>     something like <style font=Helvetica size=24pt ...>, when the author
>     chose to use that instead of <title>? It won't have a clue. That's a
>     bad example, but shows the extreme of the problem.

I think its a good example. The answer is. Ignore it. Educate users that 
using <title> will give you better results. Unless of course, your company 
marketing department will fire you if you don't at least try to prepresent 
your company logo in Times New Roman. (This is a true situation in many 
companies).

>     
>     Howabout an author specing a font like <style font=WingDings...> or
>     <style font=Times New Roman ...>, and I happen to be viewing the 
>     document on Netscape for Unix, and don't (and won't ever, likely)
> have 
>     either of those two fonts?
I have been working on exactelly this problem. As a proposed first solution 
I would suggest a tag like:
<font name="Times New Roman" number=17 size=24>
The font number is used to provide some BASIC SIMPLE mappings between some 
common fonts (Pick your favorite 20 the get included with the Mac, Windows, 
and some common UNIX's). If I use "Geneva" on my Mac it gets assigned font # 
6. If I read it on my PC the PC doesn't know "Geneva" so it looks up font #6 
and gets "Arial". I am this first to admit that this is not a great 
solution. I have read about some technologies to develop Font Metrics and 
use things like Multiple Master technology for these things, but for a first 
simple solution this would work.

And the kicker is: If you don't implement this in your browser, or can't 
find the right font. Ignore it. It is much easier to tell users that the 
font mapping is just best effort rather than no effort. Also, to add to 
previous suggestions from this list, I suggest that we continue to educate 
users about structured markup.


Alex Hopmann
ResNova Software, Inc.

Received on Monday, 31 October 1994 03:42:22 UTC