Re: What's wrong with

    From: mwm@contessa.phone.net (Mike Meyer)

|    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.
---

Again, I didn't really mean to say that it was critical that the author
herself be able to specify the typography.  Rather, I would expect that
serious material to be designed by professional designers, just as most
serious books are.  I have a reasonably good eye, I have studied
typography some, and I have hand-set a book of my own poems (a long time
ago), and I know that if I were writing a book I would want someone
more capable than I to design its physical appearance.  I'd certainly
feel the same way about a serious Web page.

|    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.
---

As I say, I agree that most authors should have help, I have to disagree
with the implied notion that one good stylesheet fits all pages.
Indeed, as I said, good typography has to follow from the material
it conveys.  So while you can almost certainly do better than the
defaults, if you always use your preferred formatting, you will be the
loser when the material has been well designed.

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Monday, 13 May 1996 00:15:02 UTC