Re: What's wrong with

> From: preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece)
>    From: Warren Steel <mudws@mail.olemiss.edu>
> |   >  If you say that a document is just words and that it is
> |   >equivalent in any displayed form, thousands of years of human history
> |   >say you're wrong.
> |       Thousands of years?  Did David choose his fonts? or Homer, Sappho,
> |   Confucius, Dante, or Chaucer?  These all lived before the advent of
> |   printing, and had little control over any manuscripts that circulated
> |   even in their own time. ...
> Eh? While all of those authors did not choose their own fonts, the
> people who prepared them for publication (or, in earlier days, copied
> them out for distribution) certainly did agonize over the appropriate
> form for presentation.

This is a critical point.

> People who think typography doesn't matter probably also believe that
> authors don't really need editors and that full-text searching can be a
> satisfactory substitute for competent indexing.  They're wrong.

This appears to confuse "typography doesn't matter" with "the author
choses the fonts". These are two DIFFERENT issues. It's only in very
recent years (basically, sometime after the DTP experiment started)
that the authors have in general been able to chose their fonts.

Personally, I believe that typography is VERY important. Far to
important to be left in the hands of the vast majority of the people
writing HTML these days, and to important to be left up to the people
with the skills demonstrated by the presentation in most available
browsers.

I'm not very good at it - but I can do a better job than what I see
from most of the those two groups. When we get real style sheets, I'll
probably cobble something together and ignore the authors sheet until
archives of GOOD style sheets show up, then peruse one of those for
something to use - and still ignore the authors sheet.

	<mike

Received on Saturday, 11 May 1996 23:50:24 UTC