- From: Iain Wilkie Logan <iainlogan@enterprise.net>
- Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 22:12:19 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Wed 17 Sep, Jordan Reiter wrote: > You felt an urge to reveal at 3:52 PM -0500 on 1997-09-16: [..] Remaining on the topic of visual browsers ... > Using SIZE or COLOR attributes also imply certain platforms--platforms > which support color, and platforms which support displaying of fonts at > different sizes. And most of platforms that support these, have fonts > within their system. The FACE attribute, unlike the color tag, is > completely degradable (as opposed to the color attribute, which may reflect > the intent of the web designer to make text appear distinct from the > background--if it does degrade, sometimes the color of the text is > identical to the color of the background.) Agreed. I just hit an example of that this afternoon, on a publicly funded site. I had to switch to my default colours to read the information I wanted! > Most platforms that support size changes and color changes in fonts share > common fonts anyway, such as Courier. You can also use the font color to > make your page unreadable. Heck! You can even make your page unreadable > by using perfectly acceptable, HTML compliant markup: > > <!-- > So this is a paragraph that talks about something important, okay? > --> > > Voila! Unreadable. QED! > Besides, Netscape offered the use of various fonts, so > that they could be cross-platform (I always used about three or four > different varieties, just to be safe). The only concern I would have is where the use of FACE would render the affected text meaningless on platforms where the font is not available - certain symbol fonts might come into that category for example. OTOH, if somebody overrode my preference for the elegant Helvetica with something graunchy like Arial, that would be just a minor annoyance I could live with. > I don't think the inherent worseness of the FACE attribute vs. SIZE & COLOR > falls under the anybrowser discussion, since color and size can't be seen > in any browser anyway. I'm not here to defend proprietary tags. I just > don't see how a claim can be made that any attributes in the FONT element > were any more "anybrowser" than another. Apart from my reservations above, I'm inclined to agree with that too. I wonder when they'll get around to <SMELZ>. That could be even more fun than <MARQUEE> ;-) All the best, Iain -- Iain Logan, Langholm, Dumfriesshire - Chartered Transport Consultant <http://homepages.enterprise.net/iainlogan/> <mailto:iainlogan@enterprise.net>
Received on Wednesday, 17 September 1997 17:11:52 UTC