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bryan -dot- westbrook -at- amd -dot- com wrote:
>
> One thing that I think people are losing sight of in the age of WYSIWYG HTML
> programs is that HTML was never meant to allow exact layout control.
>
> .. I revised a document ... software had inserted font face, size, and color
> tags (as well as ...) for every cell of that table. ...
>From the Wold Wide Web Consortium's "Guidelines for authoring":
> 2.FONT tag considered harmful! Many filters from word-processing packages,
> and also some HTML authoring tools, generate HTML code which is completely
> contrary to the design goals of the language. What they do is to look at a
> document almost purely from the point of view of layout, and then mimic that
> layout in HTML by doing tricks with FONT, BR and (non-breaking spaces).
> HTML documents are supposed to be structured around items such as paragraphs,
> headings and lists. Yet some of these documents barely have a paragraph tag
> in sight!
>
> The problem comes when the content of pages needs to be updated, or given a
> new layout, or re-cast in XML (which is now to be the new mark-up language).
> With proper use of HTML, such operations are not difficult, but with a muddle
> of non-structural tags it's quite a different matter; maintenance tasks become
> impractical. To correct pages suffering from injudicious use of FONT, try the
> HTML Tidy program, which will do its best to put things right and generate
> better and more manageable HTML.
I think they understate the case.
There's a natural division between document structure, which the author must
handle, and display or printing options which often need to be under user
control:
user may have bad eyes, need bigger font
colourblind, needs different colours
wants prinout to fit his binders
wants display to fit his window
simple preference
I believe that it is a design deficiency if a general-purpose text-handling
system allows the author insert font settings anywhere except in a style
sheet, and an outright bug if it inserts them itself.
> By the time I was through cleaning that mess up, not only did it look better
> but it was only 10% of the original size and was compatible all the way back
> to the earliest browsers that allow tables.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dick Margulis [mailto:margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2001 1:05 PM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: Re: font size equivalence
>
> The HTML font sizes are relative to the user's selected browser preferences.
> Different browsers interpret point sizes and pixel counts differently (look
> at the same page in Netscape and IE to see what I mean); so it's really not
> possible to equate the two numbering systems.
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