The Future of Reading

Authoring Web-Standards Pages: Like Setting Type in the Days of Gutenberg...

2008-08-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

I've just spent the last few days working to build a set of Web pages which are authored to W3C standards (HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1) They're now up on my website:

http://www.billhillsite.com/

I've done some HTML authoring before, of course. But I always stayed away from anything but the simplest hand-coding. When I wanted to do something more complex (typographically speaking), I'd fire up a publishing tool, which would let me do things in a visual way and then translate what I'd done into code.

This time - at least at first - I didn't really care about the code itself. I was creating the pages in order to show off how Embedded OpenType (EOT) font embedding could be used to really enhance readability on the Web, by allowing Web designers to use high-quality commercial fonts on their pages, even though readers would not have those fonts installed.

It worked like a charm - at least as far as my goals of showing off the technology were concerned. I even apologized for the code when I posted the pages, and explained that they were merely a vehicle to show EOT actually working.

I wanted to post the pages quickly, to coincide with an announcement by font vendor Ascender Corporation that it was supporting Embedded OpenType (EOT) and launching a new website:

http://fontembedding.com/

I'd have liked to have posted a Web-standards set of pages, too, but there just wasn't time. My colleague Chris Wilson tried to warn me. He even coded up the first page. But we couldn't get them done in time for the announcement, so I decided to go with what I had.

Reactions were wildly different. One or two people were really helpful - one offered to give up some of his time to convert the pages to cleaner Standards-compatible code. But some were downright rude. Don't they get it? If you disagree with someone, but you're civil about it, there's a good chance they'll listen to your argument.

Anyway, I'd already decided that I needed a set of identical Web-standards pages up there. While the offer to make them for me was very generous, it wouldn't do much to improve my personal level of understanding. So I thought it was time to get my hands dirty. I bought a pile of HTML and CSS books, then set about deconstructing Chris's page until I'd figured out how it worked. (If you want to learn how to paint, the best way is to study the work of a master...)

You can't use any really visual tool to do this work - they all end up inserting chunks of their own code, which is inefficient and impossible to understand.

Chris recommended I use Notepad, the basic text editor that comes with Windows. I also tried FrontPage, which worked fine as long as you stuck to the HTML view. I found life a lot easier with line numbers, so Chris told me to try Notepad++, and that's what I ended up using.

It's a good tool, and it's available free on:

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Chris's other suggestion was to use Visual Studio, but that's way too heavy-duty for me - I am only an egg (from Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land - See BOOKS I RECOMMEND).

My first page was a struggle, as you'd expect. But it was a great feeling when I finally got it to do what I wanted. It was even better when the W3Cs HTML validator service passed it (after I'd tidied up - it caught a couple of orphaned opening and closing tags first time around).

After that, my coding for each of the subsequent pages got steadily quicker.

I think Web standards are great. I've been a big supporter inside Microsoft. They still need to be evolved to support really great typography, because the Web is without doubt the publishing medium that will replace paper, and should be capable of doing anything you can do with paper (especially as screens get better).

My experience with authoring standards-compatible pages by hand - and the fact that there isn't any other acceptable way - really got me thinking.

We're back in the days of Gutenberg. In those days, all text had to be set by hand. It was a job for the real expert - not something any regular person could ever do. One of the world's great type designers, Herman Zapf, told a conference a few years ago that no-one has ever yet succeeded, despite all the technology developed since, in setting type as well as Gutenberg.

The key to Gutenberg's setting was that he used many more ligatures than are in common use today. A ligature (from the Latin root meaning to bind) is a special character which creates a new composite binding together two or more letters in order to make them fit better together. The most common examples are ff, fi, ffl, ffi, etc.

Most typefaces today have only a handful of ligatures. But Gutenberg cast many additional ones which ensured a tight and aesthetically pleasing fit of groups of two, three, four or more letters.

We see character sets in typefaces being extended all the time to support more languages. OpenType has given us the ability to create many more ligatures. But we're not yet using that capability to its full potential.

Hand-coding standards-compatible Web pages is just like setting type by hand. If I want a true apostrophe, for instance, I have to type " ’ ", or paste it in. True double or single quotes, em-dashes - they all have to be hand-coded.

How sick is that?

Hand-setting of type was a huge bottleneck in the printing process. It took about 400 years (until Victorian times) before machines like the Linotype and Monotype typecasters were able to take over most of the load.

Of course, access to machines like that was pretty much limited to professional publishing concerns.

The typewriter made it possible for almost anyone to put print on paper - pretty ugly, limited, monospaced print, it's true, but it was great leap forward.

Since the advent of the personal computer in the 1970s we've seen steady progress in the quality of printed material ordinary non-experts can produce. Dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers have been replaced by laser and inkjet printers. Regular word-processing software like Microsoft Word can turn out very professional documents. The desktop publishing revolution of the 1980s brought software which can do just about anything you want. And you don't have to be an expert to use any of these - templates and default settings will give you professional results.

And here we are with the Web. It's the most important publishing medium in human history. Because for the first time it democratizes both the production AND distribution of high-quality content. And you can read it on a screen, keep it up to date, re-purpose it, etc.

But it's clear to me that we're still missing a huge piece of technology: an authoring tool which can be used by anyone without expert knowledge( i.e. the ability to hand-code) which produces standards-compatible, professional-quality Web pages.

That's the Desktop Publishing revolution of the 21st Century, and it's still waiting to happen...

Introducing the Colophon to the Web: a New Business Model for Fonts?

2008-08-02T21:26:00.000-07:00

For hundreds of years, printers and publishers have included a Colophon in books. That's a section - usually a page, often at the back of the book - which describes which fonts were used to set it, and perhaps gives some history of who created those particular fonts and when.

Here's an example of the kind of information it might contain. I've used the font Baskerville Old Face, which is part of the Linotype Library, and information I reproduced from the Linotype website.

"This book is set in Baskerville Regular Old Face, which was designed by John Baskerville in 1750, and belongs to the Baskerville Font Family, comprising 6 fonts in Windows TrueType format, which is part of the Linotype Originals.

John Baskerville (1706-1775) was an accomplished writing master and printer from Birmingham, England. He was the designer of several types, punchcut by John Handy, which are the basis for the fonts that bear the name Baskerville today. The excellent quality of his printing influenced such famous printers as Didot in France and Bodoni in Italy.

Though he was known internationally as an innovator of technique and style, his high standards for paper and ink quality made it difficult for him to compete with local commercial printers. However, his fellow Englishmen imitated his types, and in 1768, Isaac Moore punchcut a version of Baskerville's letterforms for the Fry Foundry. Baskerville produced a masterpiece folio Bible for Cambridge University, and today, his types are considered to be fine representations of eighteenth century rationalism and neoclassicism. Legible and eminently dignified, Baskerville makes an excellent text typeface; and its sharp, high-contrast forms make it suitable for elegant advertising pieces as well."

Baskerville Regular Old Face (graphic from Linotype website)

If you love type as much as I do, you just lap up this sort of information. But even if you don't, isn't it cool to find out that the typeface you've been enjoying has been around for more than 250 years?

So I always look at the Colophon in a book...

Anyway, as readers of this blog will know, I've been trying to drive the establishment of Embedded OpenType as a Web standard which would allow the legal use of high-quality commercial fonts on the Web.

People are stuck today with a limited choice of fonts they can use on their websites which they're sure will be on the computers of everyone viewing them. But if we can embed any fonts we've bought, then the Web will explode with great design and high-quality typography. There's absolutely no reason your website can't look as great as the beautifully-set magazine you buy every month.

And that started me thinking: Why not introduce the venerable concept of the Colophon to the Web? Could it be used to drive a new business model for fonts which would benefit the font industry, web developers and designers - and the people who visit their sites?

I've run the idea past a few font folks I know, and they're quite excited about it.

Here's how it might work:

You're a web designer or developer, and you want to use a font, or a number of different fonts, on your site. You've bought legal copies of all the fonts you plan to use, and they all come with Web embedding rights.

You create a Colophon page on your site which tells users about the fonts you used. But it doesn't just give their history and interesting information about the font. It also includes a link to the font vendor(s).

If your readers like the fonts you used, they simply click on the link, and it takes them to a site where they can buy the fonts, download them, and start using them right away in their own documents and websites.

Now, you could see how this could be taken further, with a business model like, say Google's AdSense. If the font vendor wished, they could pay you a small commission every time someone bought a font using the link from your site. The fonts you use might actually end up paying for themselves, or even making you money!

For the industry, Web Font Embedding would change from being perceived by some as "a potential threat to their valuable Intellectual Property" into a marketing, advertising and sales vehicle with the potential to really increase their font revenue by exposing their products to more customers than ever before.

Another alternative thought I had was that perhaps the End User License Agreement for a font with Web Embedding permissions turned on might require the website designer or developer to put a Colophon on their site in return for the embedding permissions, or perhaps a price discount.

I'm brainstorming here, just putting out a couple of ideas. Perhaps developers would find a compulsory Colophon too onerous a requirement. I don't know. It would be up to the industry and the Web to work out the details and create a workable business model that benefits everyone.

I'd be interested in readers' thoughts. There are probably even better ideas out there I haven't yet considered. But I'm quite taken with the concept of fonts as a viral marketing channel. The more people who use fonts, the more people who buy fonts, the more we'll be sure of a healthy font industry for the next 550 years. And we do need a healthy font industry; there's lots of work still to be done, as publishing moves from paper to the screen.

Lack of Decent Tools Holding Back "The Web for the Rest of Us"...

2008-08-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

I'm going to take a little trip down PC Memory Lane... Bear with me; this isn't idle reminiscing. There is a point, and I'll eventually get to it.

"Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it" is a very valid saying, and I feel that on the Web we've forgotten some things we should have learned a long time ago.

I remember the very first time I typed text into a computer, and saw it in halfway decent type. It would be 1984, and I was using MacWrite on an Apple Macintosh.

Up until then, I'd used a few MS-DOS and CP/M PCs with applications like WordStar - for years, the leading word processor - or WordPerfect.

MacWrite was like a breath of fresh air. Pretty basic, but in terms of graphical display of text, miles ahead of anything else at the time. Then along came Microsoft Word, and at last we had a word processor that was both powerful AND created text that was at least part-way readable on screen. What you saw on the screen was a reasonable approximation of what you'd get when you printed out your document.

By 1986, I was working for Aldus Corporation in Edinburgh. PageMaker - by then the world's leading desktop publishing package - depended entirely on the bet the company had made on the future of the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Microsoft made the same bet with Windows - and Word for Windows. WordPerfect - by then the world's leading word processor - was still running on MS-DOS. The company failed to make that leap of faith, and was toppled from its leadership as a result. A GUI version eventually appeared, but it was too little too late; by then Word had achieved an installed base that was pretty much unassailable.

Aldus made the same GUI bet on Windows. There were PC GUI competitors, like Ventura Publisher, which ran on the GEM windowing environment.

I have to confess, the very first time I saw PageMaker running on a PC, it looked like a bad joke. The PC in question was a British Apricot (it was all about fruit in those days...), and it was running a Hercules Graphics card. The Hercules card ran in EGA mode, and created pixels which were rectangles much deeper than they were wide. The result was that a page of a publication created in PageMaker on it was also wildly stretched. The new desktop publishing and word processing software all depended on WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), which allowed you to accurately place text and graphics. On a Hercules card it was a disaster.

However, along came VGA graphics cards for the PC, and at last we had square pixels, color (although we Brits spelled it colour, of course), and acceptable WYSIWYG. The Macintosh, of course, had been designed with square pixels from the start. There were also 72 of them to the inch, which mapped very nicely to printers' measures, in which there are 72 points to the inch.

That resolution worked in a world where everything was printed out at 300 dpi or better. But it was way too coarse for reading on a screen.

The PC industry benefitted hugely from Moore's Law, which stated that the processing power of the CPU would keep on doubling every two years while its cost would halve. Unfortunately, Moore's Law didn't apply to PC graphics. Dell shipped a 147ppi laptop about ten years ago, so it took ten years for pixels to double. But the price didn't come down, and software manufacturers (including Microsoft) failed to see the opportunity at that time, didn't bring out resolution-independent Operating Systems and applications, and the result was a suboptimal experience on high-resolution displays.

That's changing now, but it's taken far too long. For years, a large proportion of PC users with high-resolution desktop and laptop machines have been running them at lower resolutions in order to make text and icons display at comfortable sizes.

For years, the computer industry kept on pretending that all PCs had a resolution of around 96ppi.

Unfortunately, the Web's largely been doing the same. That's why we see websites which have fixed pixel sizes, and contain measurements in pixels. Try looking at one of those sites on a 204ppi display, though, and the problems scream out.

The pixel is a relative dimension - it depends on the resolution of the PC on which it's being displayed. Human vision, though, depends on absolute measurements - because the fovea, which we use for all high-resolution work like reading, is 0.2mm in diameter. That's true for the entire human race - there aren't some folks with 0.1mm foveas and some with 0.3mm; foveal vision is all around 600ppi resolution. (See earlier postings in this blog if you'd like more detail).

So that's the first mistake we're repeating.

The second is this: When I typed text into Word, or laid out a page in PageMaker, I didn't have to do any coding at all. All the coding took place behind the scenes - I just provided the content.

Most people have content they want to communicate. In the past it was documents, now it's more and more about Web content.

Sure, there are visual authoring tools out there. But most of them still encourage fixed-pixel-dimensions. And they also put large chunks of their own proprietary code into the content.

There were a few factors that made this happen. First, the formatting capabilities of HTML were pretty rudimentary in the beginning. I remember the first time I saw the Mosaic browser. You could have any typeface you wanted, as long as it was Times...

The only way you could get text in an unusual typeface was to create a graphic containing it. It was fixed-pixel, of course, and wouldn't scale. Designers also tried to drag the 35,000-year-old First Law of Design into the Web: First, fix the size of the space you're going to fill.

HTML's become a lot more powerful, especially with the addition of Cascading Style Sheets. And there's an opportunity to get back to the ideal behind it - that content and formatting should be kept separate - and still have high-quality formatting, layout and text composition.

Web-standard markup is clearly the way to move forward. But something really important is missing. To achieve Web-standards markup today, you have to code your content by hand in a plain-text editor like Notepad.

That's just ridiculous! It's like going back to the days of WordStar, when if you wanted to format your text, you had to you use all kinds of esoteric keystrokes to put special codes into your content. In fact, it's worse - WordStar at least had keyboard shortcuts. To create valid HTML, you have to know all the codes and enter them by hand.

Here's my wish list:

A WYSIWYG HTML editor which displays text in your browser of choice and shows you the changes interactively, BUT
Writes only Web-standards HTML and CSS which validates using the W3Cs HTML validator service
Inserts no code which will not validate
Supports adaptive layout - so you can interactively see what your site will look like in a window the size of a cellphone, or a cinema-sized display - and anything in between (perhaps to cover extreme cases, allowing you to create a special CSS stylesheet for very small or very large windows)
Detects the display on which your page is running so it can make intelligent layout decisions
Supports the highest-quality typography possible
Supports Font Embedding, so users who don't have the fonts you want to use installed will still see them (but doesn't enable or encourage easy font piracy).

I'll probably add to this list as I learn more.

Today, to get the ability to "just write content - not code", I'm forced to use a blog hosting environment like this one. But the layout and readability is pretty poor. I have only the shallowest control over layout and typography. It's the best I can find today - but it's nowhere near good enough.

Blogger archives my content. But I want to be able to create my own content archive, and then build different ways people can view it. A blog forces you to read articles by "Date Posted". Sure, you can explore the archive, but not systematically.

I'd like to be able to create "An Issue" - like the issue of a magazine - containing a "set" of articles. I'd like people to be able to read from "Oldest to Newest", or with articles grouped "by Subject". All of these things are easily possible at runtime, using meta tags.

I made those funky Web pages as an experiment. To try and get a handle on what's wrong and how it might be fixed.

I'm on a journey of discovery right now. I'd be glad to get ideas from other people on these topics - and others, because I'm sure there are plenty of issues I haven't yet encountered.

If someone's building a tool like this, I'd love to try it. If not, I'll keep collecting requirements in the hope that one day I can interest the right people.

Moving Forward with Industry-Supported Font Embedding on the Web

2008-07-31T12:57:00.000-07:00

First, let me apologize for not posting anything for a while. I try never to "post just for the sake of posting". I like to have real issues to raise, and hopefully spark some discussion. I assume anyone reading this blog is much more interested in that than in what I had for breakfast today.

For the past two or three weeks I've been very focused on trying to make progress on Font Embedding on the Web. This might seem like a small issue - but in fact it is one of the major blockers to achieving real readability on the Web.

It doesn't matter if you have all the sophisticated layout and text composition support in the world; unless you have the right high-quality fonts to use with it, the result will always be pretty awful.

The paucity of high-quality screen-readable fonts in Web pages is a critical problem that has to be overcome before we can move forward.

We're used to a huge choice of fonts that work well if we're designing or creating print. It's fairly easy to create fonts that work at the high resolution of print, or on the Web at large sizes for headings and so on - although even there you have to careful that the fonts will actually be available on the reader's system, or else make the poor-quality choice of creating headings as graphics, which means they can't scale.

Fonts-as-graphics is a quick and dirty workaround, and it goes against the whole spirit of what the Web is becoming; a standards-driven model much closer to the original concept of HTML and its forebears, XML and SGML. Internet Explorer 8 will use Web-standards rendering by default.

There are two main contenders to solve the problem of font embedding on the Web: Font Linking, and Embedded OpenType.

Embedded OpenType (EOT) was originally a proprietary Microsoft technology, first devised to allow fonts to travel with Word documents, and later revised to allow fonts to be embedded in web pages.

It was introduced in Internet Explorer in 1996. But Netscape, the main competing browser, went with another system using technology from Bitstream. Neither became a standard, and as a result EOT languished.

About a year ago I realized it was critical to solve "Fonts on the Web", and brought together a "virtual team" inside Microsoft to make EOT an open Web standard. The standards proposal is currently with the W3C, the Web standards body.

In the meantime, competing browsers introduced support for Font Linking, which simply allows raw TrueType font files to be posted on servers and called by Web pages when they need them.

There are a number of problems with Font Linking. Not only does it make it very easy to pirate fonts (and piracy is already a huge issue for the font industry), but it is expressly forbidden in the End User License Agreement of just about every one (if not all) of the well-known, high-quality, commercial fonts. Not least of the problems is that no-one even thought of raising the question with the font industry before simply implementing it in Web browsers.

Font Linking proponents say that means people will use free fonts, and the font industry can adequately police piracy of commercial fonts. I disagree completely.

Policing font piracy is hard enough today. It's only practical to address abuses by companies illegally using single-user font licenses as site licenses for all their computers. It's just about impossible to police individual-user piracy. The Web would explode the number of instances, and any policing would be quickly overwhelmed.

Call me suspicious or paranoid, but I can't help feeling that's exactly what some of the more rabid members of the OpenSource community want - for font piracy to become as prevalent as music piracy. Intellectual Property should be abolished and everything should be free, as far as they're concerned.

When we implemented EOT a long time ago, we held talks with the font industry and reached agreement on a system they could accept. One result of these discussions was that we actually revised the TrueType format (the tables of which are still at the heart of OpenType, no matter whether it contains TrueType font outline data or Adobe's Type 1 or CFF). We created a set of "Embedding bits" which could be set by the font creator to disable embedding of that font, or enable different levels of embedding (read-only, editable, or full installable).

Earlier this month, font creator and vendor Ascender launched a new website called:

http://www.fontembedding.com/

Ascender announced its support for EOT, and was highly critical of Font Linking. The site has lots of information, some free fonts, and a Web tool to make EOT font objects.

Adobe is already supporting EOT. Hopefully we'll see other font vendors join the effort.

Even before I'd heard about the Ascender site, I'd decided to go and make some Web pages using EOT to show how fonts could make the Web much more readable.

I'm not a Web guru. I'm a type guy, and a writer. So instead of hand-coding HTML and CSS, I decided to use a publishing application, then embed the fonts after I'd created the pages.

One of the great things about EOT font embedding is that there is already a great set of really high-quality fonts out there which anyone who bought Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, or Mac Office 2008 can already use.

We call them the C* fonts, since they were optimized for ClearType and we gave them all names which began with "C". They all have Editable Embedding enabled, and they're probably the best fonts in the world for reading on a screen. A lot of money and a huge amount of effort went into building them.

I designed my pages using three of them - Cambria for body text, and Candara and Calibri for headings, pull quotes, etc.

Given the current limitations of the Web, I made the pages fixed size. If you read my last posting, you'll know I'm opposed to this - I want to see Adaptive Layout like that used by the New York Times Reader applied to Web pages. But we're not there yet, so I had to compromise.

I took content from this blog to use in my experiment, so I didn't have to write fresh stories as well as learn a whole load of new skills.

The pages can only be properly viewed in Internet Explorer, since it's so far the only browser with EOT. But if you're running another browser on Windows Vista, or you bought a copy of Office 2007 or Mac Office 2008, the fonts will already be on your system, and it should display OK. Otherwise you'll get font substitution and the pages will break (big time!). They may even break anyway; for my first experiments I wasn't concerned about cross-browser compatibility, oly about exercising font embedding...

With that caveat, you'll find the pages at:

http://www.billhillsite.com/

I created the font objects using WEFT, the Windows Embedding Fonts Tool, which you can find at:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/WEFT.mspx

Read the instructions and go through the tutorial before you try it for yourself, to avoid problems.

WEFT lets you create an EOT font object with a subset containing only the characters you use on your site, or which supports only the language in which you write. This reduces the size of the objects dramatically to give faster download times. That's a huge plus, if you're creating a Japanese website. A small subet would probably contain all the characters you'd ever use - and it would be well under a tenth of the size of the full font (Meiryo, for instance has some 22,000-odd characters).

The publishing application I used to generate the pages added a whole lot of its own proprietary code. My friend and colleague Chris Wilson took one look and freaked out.

Then he started to duplicate what I'd done using Web-standards markup, validated by the W3C's HTML Validator service. You can find that at:

http://validator.w3.org/

It freaked out even worse at my pages than Chris did. "85 coding errors, you moron! Starting with no DOCTYPE..."

I decided it was time I learned a lot more about Web standards myself - and about authoring pages using them.

So I bought a big stack of books and started to teach myself. And that's also been occupying me for the past week or so.

I actually managed to write my first W3C-validated Web page (also using a stylesheet, no less).

One clear issue that I've come away with even this early in my learning: Authoring visually-interesting content by having to write HTML code using a text editor truly sucks!

I'm a type - and content - guy. I don't really want to have to learn to become a coding geek. But I'm being forced into it.

It's high time someone wrote an easy-to-use Web authoring tool which spits out clean Web-standards HTML and CSS, without adding a whole pile of its own (often proprietary) code.

Chris' first attempt to duplicate my page worked really well - and it was less than 8K in size, when my original was nearly 40K.

Many of the folks I know seem quite happy coding in Notepad. But you really shouldn't have to do that. There has to be a better way for the hundreds of millions of non-coders who also use the Web to create their own standards-compliant content.

I plan to talk to a number of different folks about that...

Adaptive Layout: Taking the Web beyond the "cave painting" stage...

2008-07-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

There’s an interesting discussion going on right now at Smashing magazine’s website on the relative merits of Fixed Layout versus Flexible Layout on the Web.

It seems that designers are still battling to try to achieve the kind of control on the Web which they’ve always had when designing documents for paper. You know: the ability to place every piece of text and graphics exactly where they want it, to the nearest 1/1000th of an inch.

They’re still “living in Flatland”, desperately trying to hold onto the kinds of design approach that have worked great for the past 35,000 years or so, but are really holding back the Web from becoming all it can be.

Humans have been designing the display of information for about 35,000 years – the earliest cave paintings. For all that time, the First Law of Design has always been to ask the question: “What is the size of space I’m filling?” That applied whether you were painting on a cave wall, carving letters into Trajan’s column in Ancient Rome, or deciding to publish People magazine on pages 8 ½ x 11 inches in size.

Once the size of the area to be filled was fixed, then design could proceed.
Over a period of about 550 years, since mass printing first appeared, a Darwinian evolution took place. Lots of experiments were tried (and failed) until we settled on a size for body text that’s about 11 points, and a column width of between 55 and 65 characters, for material to be read at normal reading distance of about 50cm.

No-one scientifically planned it. What happened was that text quickly settled down at the sizes which were optimal for the human visual system. We read with an area of our retinas called the fovea, which is only 0.2mm in diameter. For more details on the psychology and physiology of reading, see some of the earlier archived articles in this blog.

Now, people often position their screen a little further away than they’d hold a piece of paper. So they should be able to adjust the text to a size that’s comfortable for them. It won’t need to change much – perhaps only a point or two in size – unless they’re reading on their living-room TV from ten feet away.

What many designers would like to do is create the same kinds of Fixed Layout they’ve been able to use in print. Their argument is, the reader can then use Zoom in his or her browser to scale those layouts to the size of their own screen.

They just don’t get it. They’re “Flat Earthers”, trying desperately to hold on to a world view that no longer makes sense.

There’s a new First Law of Design: “When creating content for the Web, you have no clue what size of screen the reader will be using”.

The range of possibilities is huge, from cellphone to laptop to desktop to living-room TV to cinema-sized screen.

At this point, any designer reading this page is probably throwing up their hands in horror and screaming “I can’t create one design that works for all of these scenarios!”

And that’s exactly my point. You can’t. Not with the Fixed Layout approach of the past. We need a new and robust Adaptive Layout technology to take Web design forward.

The good news is that the human visual system hasn’t changed, and many of the parameters we know from past experience still work. They just need to be used in a much more flexible way.

A key concept behind Adaptive Layout is that information on the Web has to become just like water. Water doesn’t just flow; it also takes the shape of the container into which it’s poured. In other words, it should adapt to the screen on which it’s being read.

The starting point should always be the human who’s actually reading the content.

Let me try to describe my ideal scenario, and then see how it fits into an Adaptive Layout world.

First, there’s a big difference between browsing for content, and then focusing on a piece of content in order to read it.

When I’m browsing, I want easy access to all the tools of the browser – menus, buttons, toolbars etc. But when I’m reading, everything on the screen which isn’t content is just a distraction and a waste of space. I want it to all go away.

When I’ve browsed to a piece of content I want to read, I should be able to hit a “Reading” button, and only content, and perhaps some basic navigation buttons like “Next page”, “Previous page”, and a button to get me back to Browsing mode, should be visible. The F11 shortcut on Internet Explorer, for example, makes the browser go full-screen. It’s not discoverable enough today, and not effectively used by any sites I know of, but the capability’s there.

Next page, Previous page? Well, yes, the content should be paginated. Research has shown consistently that paging is much better for reading than scrolling.

What should a “page” look like? It should look like the full size of whatever screen I’m using. If the browser knows the text size the reader wants to use, then it knows the width of a column. If it knows the size of the display, then it can calculate how many columns to display.

If you then throw in all the typographic techniques we’ve learned over 550 years like kerning, ligatures, great word- and letter-spacing, etc. you get text that’s as readable as text on paper. Since you know how many columns are in use, you have a grid for placement of graphics.

To see this kind of layout at work, take a look at the New York Times Reader, or the Seattle P-I Reader. They were both created using the proprietary Windows Presentation Foundation technology. But the same thing can be done on the Web, using Web-standard content.

Instead of trying to hold on to the past, the design community and software developers should be working together to develop this technology and make it mainstream for the Web.

It took hundreds of years to develop the state of the art in readable text on paper. We’ve been creating and reading Web content for less than 20 years. We’re still at the “caveman painting on a wall” stage as far as creating content which can be read on the whole range of screens is concerned.

Links:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/06/26/flexible-layouts-challenge-for-the-future/
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/newsreader/

The best Windows Vista machine I’ve ever had – and it’s from Apple!

2008-06-04T09:58:00.001-07:00

I’ve been pretty silent on the blog front for a while; there’s been a lot going on, but I’ve been too busy to write about it…

Among the things which have happened is that I got a new laptop – an Apple MacBook Pro. But I spend no time at all in Mac OS X; the machine is set up to dual-boot to either OS X or Windows Vista, and Vista is where I spend all my time.

Now, I know I work for Microsoft, so you’d expect me to say this – but I really love Vista, especially on this MacBook. It’s the best Vista machine I’ve ever had. Thanks to Malcolm in the Microsoft AppleLab (which happens to be just along the hallway from my office), who set me up with a disk image which had all the right Vista drivers, this has been the most trouble-free setup I’ve ever had.

You have to hand it to Apple. They make stunningly beautiful hardware. OS X is also designed to be beautiful, but there are things about it I can’t stand.

The major one, for me, is the blurriness of Apple’s text rendering. Apple has its own “clone” of the Microsoft ClearType technology I helped to invent (they got the rights to all the Microsoft patents as part of a major cross-licensing deal).

There are basically two implementation strategies you can pursue with ClearType.

In the first, you can use the additional resolution which addressing the RGB sub-pixels gives you to make text which adheres exactly to the shape of the high-resolution print font. This gives you great font shapes, but you can’t avoid blurred edges.

The second strategy is the one we actually use in Windows. We use the additional resolution to make text shapes better, too, but we also try to snap the edges of characters to the higher-resolution sub-pixel boundaries, and our color filtering system is designed to create characters which are as sharp as they can be.

This means you do have to make tiny compromises on character shapes – but you end up with text that’s much sharper and less fatiguing to read, especially if you’re reading for extended periods. Research has shown that blur is an important factor in eye fatigue when reading.

Now, there are of course many highly-vocal zealots on both sides of the argument (this is a Mac v. Windows argument, after all).

But in my view, there’s no “right” or “wrong” here. There’s no question that Apple’s rendering strategy gives you much better WYSIWYG – what you see on the screen is closer to what you’d see if you printed the text.

On the other hand, when we invented ClearType we weren’t at all concerned with printing. We were trying to improve reading on-screen to make it as good as it could possibly be.

With Apple’s long background in areas like design, publishing, etc, it’s understandable why they took the route they did.

However, what that means for me is that I have a really hard time reading text in Mac OS X, or Apple’s Safari browser.

Every time I’ve switched from OS X to Windows Vista, my eyes have just given a huge sigh of relief. Vista is much sharper and crisper, and I can read text forever without getting tired.

Having said that, this MacBook runs Vista blisteringly fast. When I need to hibernate it, it switches off instantly. I have a laptop, made by one well-known manufacturer, which can take up to four minutes to turn off when hibernating.

The screen’s bright and clear. The keyboard’s great. The trackpad’s one of the best, although I much prefer a mouse, so I plug in a Microsoft Wireless Optical mouse into one of the USB slots.

The “magnetic snap-in” power cord is a great innovation. I’ve seen so many laptop power cords get damaged over the years – or even worse, get snagged and pull the laptop off a table. You just know if this magnetic cord gets inadvertently pulled it’ll just snap out without damaging either the cord of the socket.

Running Vista, I can happily log on securely to the Microsoft corporate network using my SmartCard. Yesterday, I did videoconferencing on it for the first time, using the inbuilt iSight webcam. It was terrific.

I’m having the best computing experience I’ve had in years. I don’t care what anyone says about Vista (including Apple, in its advertising). It’s a great operating system, and it makes WindowsXP look and feel so out of date – especially on a MacBook or iMac (I’ve run it on both).

So thank you, Apple, for making the best Windows machine I’ve ever had!

The Letters We take For Granted

2008-04-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not typing this on my normal laptop. The one I normally take on the road with me didn't die - but it might as well have!

The problem's so simple you'd think you can just work around it. The letter "e" on the keyboard stopped working...

As key failures go, it couldn't have been any worse. Cryptographers and code-breakers have known for a very long time that E is the most-used letter in the English language - and I presume for just about any of the Latin-based languages, too. So its #1 in the Frequency Table of letters you try when cracking simple substitution codes.

Yes, there's a workaround. The spell-checker in Word, for instance, will automatically turn "kyboard" into "keyboard" - but it doesn't catch anything like all of the missing letters automatically, and selecting suggestions manually is a pain when every second or third word has a red squiggle under it.

Of course, if you're really stuck, you can always find an "e" somewhere, copy it into your clipboard and paste it in with Ctrl-V instead of typing it. But try doing that for even a short email and see how wearing it gets.

We take the alphabet so much for granted. It has been described as the biggest breakthrough humans have ever made.

The alphabet marks the major divergence between two sets of languages - alphabetic and pictographic.

With an alphabet, making up new words is easy. You just pick from the library of 26 or 28 letters, there are standard prefixes and suffixes, and - hey presto! - a new word. Because it's made up of standard components, it's fairly easy for anyone to figure out what it means.

To a certain extent the same is true in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. There are re-usable components. But it gets very complicated, and you end up with, say 20,000 or more Kanji characters and it's about impossible for anyone to learn them all.

The Latin-based languages used to be pictographic, too. The letter A, for instance, started life the other way up -as a picture of an ox. When it travelled from the Middle East to Greece in the writing of the Phoenicians, it was rotated 90 degrees to become the letter alpha, eventually making the full 180-degree rotation into the A as we know it today.

For a fascinating book on this subject - which is also great for getting children interested - read Oscar's Ogg's The 26 Letters. I see there's actually a copy for sale on Amazon for the princely sum of 92 cents...

Another interesting fact about an alphabet. It gives words a directionality. You can read the word "ate" just fine, but can you make sense of "eta"?

One of the early forms of Greek writing (~700BC) used left-to-right and right-to-left writing on alternate lines. This form of writing was called boustrephon, which means "as the ox plows the field". In other words, writing was an unbroken trail of meaning.

However, as alphabets became widely used, it was seen that this form of writing no longer worked if words had a "direction". So instead we adopted a convention of reading from left-to-right only (for Latin languages), and making a rapid right-to-left eye movement to the beginning of the next line. This innovation worked, and that's how we read today.

Font Creators Need To Make Up Their Minds - Fast - About Fonts on the Web

2008-04-02T20:12:00.001-07:00

Last week I attended a one-day conference on "The Business of Type" organized by the Font Designers' Rights Coalition - a body which concerns itself with helping to ensure font designers' IP is protected and they get the proper return for the investment they make in time and expertise.

As anyone who reads this blog will know, it's a goal I strongly support.

I was a little disappointed that at least some of the designers who spoke still seemed "stuck in the 20th Century", and more concerned about graphics and print service bureaux keeping and using illicit copies of their custom fonts which they'd received from customers to output their print jobs, than the potential threat the Web poses to their future unless they act quickly.

Talk about not seeing the wood for the trees! While that is an issue, it's totally dwarfed by the risk to font IP from the Web, and especially the proposal from the Opera browser folks to the WorldWideWeb Consortium (W3C) that Web designers should be able to point to any font put up on a server as a raw font file.

In public, the Open Source folks will confirm that they know this means web designers can use only freeware fonts (most of which aren't very good, because they haven't had the time and money invested in them).

But like a lot of the Open Source statements, it's impossible not to get the impression that what they really mean is "wink,wink - we know you'll copy commercial fonts up there and our proposal will let you do that, but we can't say so in public".

A large proportion of them believe that fonts, like all other software, should be free, and this proposal would erode font value in no time.

Today, the font industry does a pretty good job of policing font piracy. If you put commercial fonts up on a server for illegal sale, it's almost certain they'll find them and take action, first with "cease and desist" letters and later if necessary with stronger measures.

But if fonts begin to be routinely put up on servers in much greater numbers to service millions of Web pages, the policing system will break down because it's not set up to handle issues on that sort of scale.

Our friend Thomas Phinney from Adobe also spoke at the conference. He unveiled data from a survey Adobe just completed which made it clear that web designers want to be able to use the fonts they know and love for print - in other words, commercial fonts - and not freeware ones. At the same time, Tom had encouraging data which showed that most designers understood the value of font IP, would be very reluctant or completely opposed to pirating fonts, and wanted a system which would make it easy for them to do the right thing.

I think we're all indebted to Thomas and Adobe for carrying out this study.

The font industry hasn't really helped matters with its attitude so far. Microsoft has had a reasonably secure Internet font embedding technology in Internet Explorer for more than a decade, but many font houses don't allow their fonts to be used in this way because of paranoia about the risk to their IP of fonts being used on the Web. Then again, we made mistakes, too. We kept it a proprietary Microsoft format instead of opening it up as a Web standard (a mistake we've now rectified).

We had a good, lively discussion at the conference. I pointed out that failing to speak out against the "raw fonts on a server" proposal could well lead the industry down a dark and dangerous road. If they did not oppose this measure and adopt and support a reasonable alternative, they might find that they ended up in the worst of all possible worlds, in which fonts become free.

Once a font is posted on a server, anyone can point to it - or even worse, download it and use it on their computer system. Our Embedded OpenType (EOT) technology was designed to put obstacles in the way of people casually pirating fonts in this way just because it's so easy.

Some of the font designers who spoke still seemed to have this quaint idea that their customers were the "printing and publishing industry". While that may have been true in the past, the reality is that now, with the Web and email, everyone's a publisher. Instead of a (substantial in size but proportionally small) subset, there are a billion potential customers out there - if the font industry can figure out how to support them in the right way.

Fonts on the Web need to behave just like fonts for print. If I'm a designer of a magazine, for instance, I can buy one legal copy of a font, and use it to create as many copies or editions of that magazine as I like. Everyone who reads that magazine gets to "use" the copy of the font it contains - no matter if the magazine sells millions of copies.

It should work just the same on the Web. If a website designer buys a legitimate copy of a font, he or she should be able to use it on their site, and everyone who visits that site ought to be able to read it in the typeface the designer specified. But they shouldn't be able to use that font in any other task or document on their own computer system, unless they themselves buy a legitimate copy.

You can't do that today. There's no standard system for "embedding" a font in a webpage. The only way a reader will see it - unless you use one of the "common" webfonts - is if they have an actual copy of that font on their own machine. That's the issue EOT embedding was designed to address.

This needs to get fixed soon - before fonts go the same way as digital music, and the font industry hits the same problems with which the music industry is now struggling.

There's bound to be a way of leveraging the needs of a billion publishers into a decent return on investment. High volume, low cost is the business model on which Microsoft was founded, and we haven't done so badly. Maybe the font industry needs to take a leaf out of that book.

Scotland Flowering Again?

2008-03-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

I was at an interesting event last night in Seattle's Rainier Club - the kick-off reception for Scotland Week, organized by Scottish Development International.

I don't have much time for politicians; when I was a newspaperman back in Scotland I saw way too much of most of them. It didn't seem like any of them really had the ideas - or even the will - to solve the problems of high unemployment, and everything else that goes with it, which is especially bad in the West of Scotland. When I visited Scotland briefly a few years ago, it seemed as if the Edinburgh area was prospering, but Glasgow and the West was still locked into a cycle of deprivation.

But last night I got a surprise. Speaking at the reception was Jim Mather, the new Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism in the Scottish Government. In a real voting upset, the Scottish National Party achieved a one-vote majority a few months ago.

Jim sounded not only like he really knew what he was doing, but he also clearly had a lot of business and industry experience before becoming a politician. Political theories sound great, but unless ideas are founded on real-world knowledge IMO they're doomed to failure.

The Scottish Government has only limited power, of course. The UK Government in London still holds the purse-strings.

But there's no reason Scotland can't be as prosperous as Ireland, which has undergone a transformation over the past decade. Or even more prosperous. It has a great education system, and many smart people with real drive.

I liked what I heard. Got a chance to speak to Jim later. Liked him even more.

I think there's a good chance the Scots may actually pull this off.

I'll be watching with interest over the next few years.

The Future of the Book

2008-03-29T22:39:00.000-07:00

This weekend I took part in a discussion panel on "The Future of the Book" at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Except that I wasn't in Virginia. Everyone else was - the other panelists, moderator Kathleen Fowler of ODU, and the audience.

Instead I was sat in front of a PC at the Old Dominion University campus in Bremerton, Washington, taking part in the discussion by Webcam. It's amazing to think that a piece of equipment costing only a couple of hundred dollars can make possible videoconferencing which used to require tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

With the ubiquity of broadband, this kind of interaction is commonplace.

I've been a musician my whole life. One of the instruments I play is the Indian sitar. When I got my very first sitar, back in Scotland in the early 1970s, it was very hard to find an instrument in the UK. I could find only one instruction book. There were no teachers. I had to order my strings by telephone from a store in London.

I bought a new sitar a few months ago - on the Web. For anyone taking up this or any other "exotic" instrument, life's very different today. You can shop for sitars online. Buy strings and accessories. You can find instructions how how to set up the instrument properly, how to tune and maintain it.

On sites like YouTube you can watch videos of sitar players - the masters, and others maybe less masterful. There are video instruction sessions. There's even a professor of music at a university in Calcutta, India, who offers online 1:1 sitar lessons by webcam!

There's a huge amount of information now available to anyone with access to a computer. The sitar is just one example. Pick any topic and you can use the Web to access information you'd never have been able to find before, which would have taken months to track down.

Want to find information on and photographs of the red-footed booby? (it's a bird). Search the Web. Bought an electronic keyboard secondhand and need the instruction manual? Find it on the Web.

I honestly don't know how we ever managed without it.

The audience at the conference were mostly writers wanting to find out how to be successful, especially in the digital age. There was a panelist who owned an independent bookstore, and a librarian.

During the panel discussion - to illustrate the change that's happening - I went online wirelessly with my Amazon Kindle and bought a book. It cost me about $4.00, it was available almost instantly, and I searched the 100,000 or so titles available to find it.

Another illustration of the rapidly-changing world happened last week, when a young Japanese woman won Japan's premier literary award, the Rashomon Award - their equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize - for her novel published serially in blog format, and read mostly on mobile telephones.

Any time of rapid change is also a time of chaos and confusion. Writers, publishers, editors, bookstores, librarians - everyone involved in the publishing business - we're all going to have to move quickly, try new things, explore new roles and business models until the chaos settles down.

Maybe it'll never settle down.

The main piece of advice I had for aspiring writers? Know your audience, then go out and find them. Publishing is now accessible to everyone, and there's no excuse for not jumping in and seeing if you can make something happen.

In a nutshell: "Go Forth and Blog!"

Proof-Reading in the 21st Century...

2008-03-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

I love the flexibility of blogging.

Back when I was a 19-year-old trainee page editor on a newspaper in Glasgow, Scotland (in the days when men were men, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth) I used to be in charge of a busy news page which I had to re-do completely five times during the course of my 12-hour shift, since the different editions went to different localities and that page was aimed at giving it a local flavor.

We went to a lot of effort to try to get the text right. The raw copy was typed up in a few cases by a professional typist from a story phoned in by a correspondent, but most of it was typed up by reporters like me - terrible typists; copy full of erasures, corrections, typing mistakes which they hadn't spotted, etc.

First job was to decide how much space in the page that story merited. Once you'd decided that, you knew how much you'd have to cut. Then it was down to editing to tighten it up, correcting mistakes as you went.

In those days, because it was a hot-metal printing operation, the copy was typed up on small pages (about half the size of regular US Letter paper, used in landscape mode). Each page was numbered and had the same tagline.

Reason for this was the typesetting operation. A Linotype or Monotype casting machine works pretty slowly. The operator typed out the letters. Each letter typed caused a brass mold to fall into the right place in the line-holder. Once he had input enough to almost fill a line of the newspaper column, it would be justified. Today a computer does this by inserting fractional spaces between the characters in its memory. But in those days it was mechanical - a set of wedges came down to force the letters apart. Then the typesetting operator hit the control which injected molten printers' metal - from a vat at the back of the machine - and the line of type was ready. Linotype, Line-o-Type: that says it all.

The setting machines were marvels of Victorian mechanical ingenuity. Operating one was like playing a church organ...The process was so slow that even a 300-word story on, say, five small pages, might be parcelled out to three or four different operators. There might be 30 or 40 of these machines all running simultaneously in a busy caseroom. With 40 vats of molten metal, printer's ink which got everywhere, and 40 guys cooped up in the same stifling atmosphere, it was a job for RightGard, Industrial Strength. To say nothing of the amount of lead dust flying around all the time...

The linotype machine, invented in 1885 by Ottmar Mergenthaler, was a hot-metal typesetting device that cast entire lines of type at one time. The typesetter used a keyboard to direct copper casts of letters and punctuation into place. A quickly-cooling molten alloy was poured into the casts and formed the line of type. The linotype machine became universally popular and was used by newspapers around the world for many years.
Hulton Deutsch (Picture and caption courtesy MSN Encarta)

It was someone's job to do the dividing up, and to recombine the lines from different operators back into a single story which would be stacked in a "galley". They'd run a roller of ink over it, take an impression on paper, and send that back up to me to check. A Galley Proof.

As you can imagine, there were lots of opportunities for mistakes. Typos, transposed lines, sections in the wrong order, etc.

Once I'd signed off on the galley proofs, it was time to build the page. A compositor would try to assemble all the stories and pictures in a "forme" or holder. You could never be sure stuff would fit. The worst problem was to find out right at the last possible minute that you didn't have enough copy set to fill the page, so you always kept some extra stuff around. Sometimes a story would have to be cut to fit. If the reporter and editor had done their jobs right, the news story would be written in "pyramidal" style - with the least-vital information at the end, so it could be cut from the bottom up.

Of course, lines sometimes got transposed (or even lost) during this complex process. So the compositor would take a page proof,which you again had to read and sign off before the page went to the mat press, then the stereo department to be cast into curved metal plates, then to the main newspaper printing press.

Despite all this care, mistakes happened all the time; typos got through the net, and papers shipped out containing errors. Not hard to understand, when you're all working at high speed to meet the page deadline (and you all wanted the chance to get down to the pub before the next page deadline). But once the page had gone, there was no chance of fixing it.

And that's why I love blogging. I write the posts, proof-read and correct them a few times, but still I often fail to catch the mistakes. It's not so easy when you're typing them in a fairly primitive edit window.

So I'll Publish the post, and read it. And almost always spot something that slipped through. Go back, fix that, Publish again, read it again, maybe find something else (repeat until it's right).

If you do spot a typo on this blog, please tell me about it. I'll always go back and fix it. Sometimes you just get a subconscious block, and fail to see an error someone else spots immediately.

Isn't blogging great?

Put Up Your Hands, And Step Away From The Keyboard!

2008-03-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

The Design Police are watching you...

http://design-police.org/

I really like this site, it's so much fun. There's a set of five template pages you can download and send to the offender whenever you see a typographic crime being committed.

Just pick the relevant judgement from the templates, then cut and paste it into a mail.

Ah, Flaming By Numbers...

Not that I agree with everything the Design Police say, of course - especially the "Comic Sans Is Illegal" viewpoint.

You may not know this, but there's a battle being fought on the Web between those who love Comic Sans and those who absolutely hate it. There are even "Comic Sans Must Die!" T-shirts for sale.

I don't use Comic Sans myself - and I never inhaled - but I have something of a soft spot for it, since it was designed by Vincent (Vinnie) Connare, who worked for me in the Typography group at Microsoft. Indeed, its full name is Comic Sans MS, which might give you a clue.

OK, we made it. But don't blame Microsoft if people abuse it. Fonts don't kill people, people kill people. (Apologies to the NRA. Or not.)

Comic Sans is what its name says: a light-hearted font which works great in cartoons and animation, can add a tinge of humor to an email, etc. But it's over-used, and you certainly wouldn't want to use it to send a message of sympathy to a bereaved friend (unless her husband the cartoonist just died in some Marx-Brothers-like farcical accident. Even then you'd want to be careful).

If the Design Police graphic (sticker? paster?) had said "Inappropiate Comic Sans" I could buy into that.

Doctor Iveslow Must Die!

2008-03-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

We forget how much we take the process of reading for granted, and how type and typography has developed over the past 550 years to make it as easy as possible for us to recognize the shapes of letters and words.

Typographic techniques like equal word-spacing in a line of text, or avoiding the use of only capital letters, give our visual system the cue it needs to make sense of dirty marks on a piece of shredded tree, or dots turned different colors on a screen.

Remember, the human "reading system" is a high-speed scanning, analysis and parsing machine. When it's moving rapidly across a line of text, it's scanning about four consecutive targets per second.

It's a 600ppi scanning machine, which normally deals with type between one-eighth and one-sixth of an inch high. And it doesn't take much to throw it off. The difference between automatic scanning you don't have to think about, and conscious parsing, is fractions of an inch (obviously proportionally more when you're reading larger text at a distance).

I pass by this road sign most days at the moment. It's on a tree just before a narrow bridge which is an obvious accident hazard. You don't have much time to read the sign, which is hand-painted in red. You just glance to the side, your brain takes a snapshot. You're past it before you realize your brain is trying to decode a puzzle as a result of data collected subconsciously by your peripheral vision.

Who is Dr. Iveslow, and can't he afford a better sign than that? Doctors are quite well paid, after all. And he seems pretty paranoid...

Then the penny drops.

DRIVE SLOW, not DR IVESLOW

Spacing matters....

Typographic disasters

2008-03-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

One problem about having such an abiding interest in type and editing is that even when you take the man out of proof-reading, you can never take the proof-reader out of the man.

You end up spotting typos and/or bad typography everywhere. Here's one I spotted in Redmond, WA.

I'm going to leave kerning criticism out of this - it's not pretty but it is readable. I'll even give Frederick's Appliance World a pass on the horrible "W"s and "M"s - they're always a problem for any condensed typeface, which you want to use to get as much information on signage like this.

But surely Frederick could have sprung for just one more "F"? Then we'd have 30% OFF! If cash was short, it's the work of a moment just to trim the bottom cross-bar off the "E". Hey, Presto! An "F"!

Using a "$" in place of an "S" is tacky but expected.

The real typographic crime is the word "CALL", with two inverted "T"s instead of "L"s.

Call me a type snob if you like, but I pass this sign a lot - and it's like someone scratching their nails down a blackboard.

Guess where I won't be shopping for an appliance?

Signing OFE for now,

bill

P.S. The offending letters are two "T"s and an ""F". TTF is of course the file extension for TrueType font files... Spooky, eh?

CSSZengarden: A Claim Too Far?

2008-03-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

It takes a lot to make me speechless, but a website I have known and respected for some time almost managed it...

The site was CSS ZenGarden, which aims to educate website designers in the use of Cascading Style Sheetsto create more interesting layouts .

http://www.csszengarden.com/

I have no problem with that. It's a good and laudable aim. They have some very interesting samples. I really like the way in which the layout of the pages changes dramatically when you switch style sheets on the same content.

What I did have a problem with was their sweeping claim:

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document.

You'll all be aware of the recent announcement that Internet Explorer 8 (on which I work) will fully support the CSS 2.1 spec when the final version ships. Hence my interest.

I've been interested in CSS since, oh, around 1996, and have especially been following the developments around CSS 2.1 and some proposals for CSS 3 functionality.

The capabilities of Cascading Style Sheets fall far short of "complete and total control". Today, they offer some level of control. As the standard evolves, we'll see more and more control possible.

But any designer who reads ZenGarden is well aware that CSS as it stands today falls a long way short of the kind of control over style and look that they can achieve in print. And until we get that kind of control we're not done. And to claim that we already have it is to destroy your own credibility.

The Web can be as beautiful and readable as the finest printed magazine. And it can be a lot more powerful medium, too. But not yet. Not today.

Problem with the ZenGarden site, with its pseudo-zen message, is that they seem to think we have already arrived at Enlightenment (they even say so).

Haven't they read their sutras? "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

CSS and the evolution of Web standards is a journey. We've made some steps along the way. But we're a long way yet from Nirvana...