RE: Origin of Verdana

Greg Hitchcock wrote (6:52 PM -0800 2/25/98):

" Just to clarify on the 96DPI issue.
" In the very early Windows days there were some observations made. Ten point
" text was the most common size used on the printed page, but when used on the
" Macintosh screen, most users changed the text size to twelve point to make
" it more readable. We found that most people read from the screen at an
" increased distance over the printed page. In a controversial decision (and
" one I still fully support) we changed the "logical" screen resolution to be
" 96 DPI instead of the ~72 DPI (and 96 x 72 in the EGA case). This made the
" text larger than true WYSIWYG, but more legible for the given point size.

This decision may arguably have made Windows somewhat more friendly for
producing everyday business documents - you've certainly done well in that
"niche." The same decision, along with many similar ones, has limited
Wintel's incursion into the professional graphic arts and multimedia
authoring businesses, including Web design. The compound interest on a
decade of missed opportunities in this market won't be paid down with some
fine free fonts.

With the bold and generally successful moves MS has made Web-ward, and its
investments in things like WebTV and handhelds, it seems to me like MS has
both a strong chance and a strong interest in getting beyond the
compromised rendering model decisions it made "in the very early Windows
days." If this[1] illustrates the consequences of applying these decisions
in a desktop OS you've been mining for a decade, I can't imagine how you
plan to deal with these issues in handhelds, on TV, in Web decoder rings,
etc. I suspect it might involve contracting the citizenries of several
ex-Soviet republics to produce alternate formats while most of us sleep.

Seems to me you'd re-think the whole concept of trying to represent
absolute physical units on screens you can't know too much about,
especially when those scaled entities will share space with unscaled raster
artwork. It's a recipe for chaos which will seriously retard the deployment
of very high-res displays, as well as that of Web-ready low-res devices.

You're also making huge investments in XML, as the next-generation native
file format for a Web-enabled Office. You're developing style sheet
languages suitable for displaying XML: XSL and CSS. So far, so good. I see
missed opportunity in your apparent resolution to use absolute measures in
these stylesheets. Absolute measures are not susceptible to inheritance;
i.e., not suited to preserving the visual relationships among styled
elements as their ancestors change. You'll have all this lovely living
structure in your source files (XML), but your display of this structure
will be either contrivedly animated, with scripts smoking away to assign
new absolute values to everything on every redraw, or earnestly dead, like
print.

[1] http://www.verso.com/agitprop/points/font_wars.GIF

________________________________
Todd Fahrner   fahrner@pobox.com

"Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take
"instructions and data from a roomful of girls armed with simple keyboard
"punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes.
"There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs
"of millions of people doing complicated things."

--Vannevar Bush, 1945.

Received on Thursday, 26 February 1998 01:27:00 UTC