Re: Joe Clark book review from pcpro

Joe,

I would have included you in the original post, but I've had quite a 
few e-mails to you bounced in the past, and figured you'd read the 
header if not the body...

Jonathan

On Monday, March 3, 2003, at 07:02 PM, Joe Clark wrote:

>
> BTW, it would have been nice to have received an actual E-mail about
> this thread. You know, I'm *on* this list, not merely present by
> name in subject lines.
>
>> I agree on the odd typography - the twirls on the image captions are a
>> little distracting (on words like system and selection).
>
> I assume you refer to the ct and st ligatures. You don't have to
> like them, of course.
>
>> The images could be
>> a bit more clear - especially those containing close to unreadable 
>> text in
>> pop-ups.
>
> We did what we could with the somewhat ridiculous constraint that
> *we couldn't print in colour*. TIFF screenshots are intrinsically
> low-resolution (72 dpi, nominally) and actually look *better*
> reduced in size. Believe me, we spent actual days doing nothing but
> manipulating and optimizing screenshots. Days and days and days. We
> removed individual pixels in more than one case.
>
> In examples where reading the onscreen text was absolutely
> necessary, we used callouts and bigger magnification sizes,
> actually.
>
> I agree to some extent with the criticism, but what you see in the
> book is the best we could do under our constraints, one more of
> which was we were unable to include the graphics on the CD-ROM,
> which might have obviated certain problems.
>
>> I don't find the US-centrism that much of a problem (as opposed to
>
> Probably because there isn't any. U.S. coverage was included where
> necessary, but a great deal of foreign information was included.
> Anybody bother to check all the screenshots in Italian, Portuguese,
> Finnish, and so on? In fact, the *lack* of emphasis on the U.S. was
> remarked upon by my publisher, but I stayed the course.
>
>> draw the right parallels. For a UK perspective, I find Australian 
>> practice
>> setting a good precedent.
>
> Check the CD-ROM for Martin Sloan's article on the subject. It was
> too lengthy to include in the main text. But you see, I didn't
> overlook the U.K.
>
>> *aside* The quote "Standards compliance is a form of programming 
>> maturity"
>> is a good one, but I hesitate to use it because of the word 
>> "programming"
>> and its implication of website creation as programming -- but that's 
>> just my
>> paranoia.
>
> Possibly a fair point, though admittedly rather minor, but I've
> found that critics of my book have quasi-Aspergerian capacities to
> expand inconsequential issues into blanket condemnations. It's a
> feature I recognize in myself, of course.
>
> -- 
>
>   Joe Clark  |  joeclark@joeclark.org
>   Author, _Building Accessible Websites_
>   <http://joeclark.org/access/> | <http://joeclark.org/book/>
>
>

Received on Monday, 3 March 2003 14:40:33 UTC