Re: The eyes have it. Or they don't.

["Mark Baker" <listsub -at- analecta -dot- com>]

Dick Margulis wrote:

> I've tried and tried, but I can't get my brain to work that way. I see a
> page as an integrated whole made up of visual and verbal elements that
> either complement each other (making the message clearer to me) or
> conflict with each other (making it more confusing). Obviously, the way
> I look at a page is as incomprehensible to content channelers as theirs
> is to me.

Dick,

I think you need to make a distinction between page design that contributes
to the readability of information and page design that actually carries the
semantics of the information. Readability (or the lack of it) may contribute
to your ability to grasp the semantics of the information, but they are
still there to be grasped, if, perhaps, with greater effort. On the other
hand if the semantics of the information is actually contained in the page
design, then if the design is lacking, the semantics will cease to be
available at all.

There are, it seems to me, only a very limited set of circumstances in which
it is appropriate to encode information semantics in the page layout. (I'd
be open to the argument that there were none.) On the other hand, page
design will always have an impact on the readability of content though
probably, as you suggest, far more for some people than for others.

But I would suggest that the cause of readability is not best served by
allowing or expecting authors to be both writers and page designers at the
same time. Apart from the man-cannot-serve-two-masters issues, there is
always the danger that the writer will, accidentally or on purpose, fall
into expressing information semantics in page design, with potentially fatal
consequences for the reusability of the content.

It is clearly the case that page design must be sensitive to the semantics
of the text (the presentation of warnings comes to mind). However the fact
that the content is a warning, and the semantics of that warning should
still be clear even if the content is viewed as plain text. These days you c
an never be sure that content won't be separated from its page design.
(Consider, for example, Google's view as HTML option for PDF documents.)

Avoiding WYSIWYG authoring helps to ensure the integrity both of the content
and of the page design. It helps to ensure that semantics are not
transferred from content to design, and to ensure that page design is
applied with complete consistency.
---
Mark Baker
Analecta Communications
www.analecta.com
+1 613 614 5881




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