- From: Jan Roland Eriksson <jrexon@newsguy.com>
- Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2002 20:34:24 +0200
- To: www-style@w3.org
- Cc: ian@hixie.ch
On Fri, 6 Sep 2002 03:04:17 +0000 (GMT), you wrote: >On 5 Sep 2002, Etan Wexler wrote: >> I would not spend substantial time on CSS if I thought >> that the ultimate effect was merely esthetic. >The whole, complete, exclusive point of CSS is esthetics... That's like saying that several hundred years of typographic evolution has only been about "esthetics". Well, in a way that could be seen as correct, but only if we move on to think a bit about what it is in our brains that recognizes something as having an esthetics value when we see it. The fact is that this "function" in us humans is a result of both evolution, and our individual "training into traditions" since childhood, about what there is that can be "decoded" and thus "recognized" to be something we are familiar with. There is no doubt that bad typesetting makes information hard to get, it even makes you tired in the process, while otoh, good typesetting can allow for a book (or a web page) to be read front to back in one go without making you tired at all [1]. So my conclusion is that it is the (web)authors obligation to suggest at least his own view of how a certain creation of his can be rendered in a good fashion; leave that out and the receiver is totally left out on a limb, even on how to start to "decode and recognize" what he has at hand. (turn off the ua.css and things really moves into the "disaster" :) <http://groups.google.com/groups?&selm=gbksat4allprkepjv69nv93ckqoqecgr41%404ax.com> [1] Jan Tschichold showed over and over again that this holds true. -- Rex
Received on Friday, 6 September 2002 14:36:19 UTC