Issues

Discuss

Paris Mayor

Low resolution - 72 dpi vs. effectively millions of dpi
Screen glare - screens emit light rather than reflect light
Cost - in print, using multiple colors, type size or face is more expensive - on web it's free - and space is unlimited
Conventions - web has different conventions than print

all points to how literature is more suited to print, but data more suited to the screen treat all content as data

scanning/skimming results in reading random paragraphs, out of order

Formatting

Font

Serif and Sans-Serif
("Footed" and "Without Feet")

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs

New York Times
ZDNet

Serif better in print, Sans-Serif better on screen, at the expense of width

The large wooden clock...
The large wooden clock...

Four Default Font Families

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz - default serif
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz - default sans-serif
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz - default monospaced
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz - default cursive

Must rely on fonts installed in user's system

Helvetica primarily on Macs, Arial primarily on IBM clones

Verdana designed specifically for Web

How Now Brown Cow qypgj - Times
How Now Brown Cow qypgj - Arial
How Now Brown Cow qypgj - Verdana

Serif particularly hard to read in small sizes

Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Times, 8pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Arial, 8pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Verdana, 8pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Times, 11pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Arial, 11pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Verdana, 11pt

Use Serif Fonts for Headlines Only

Pentagon Links Kuwaiti Gunmen to Al Qaeda

Pentagon officials said today that intelligence officials had turned up links between Al Qaeda and the two gunmen who killed a United States Marine and wounded a second after infiltrating a military training exercise in Kuwait on Tuesday.
vs.
Pentagon Links Kuwaiti Gunmen to Al Qaeda

Pentagon officials said today that intelligence officials had turned up links between Al Qaeda and the two gunmen who killed a United States Marine and wounded a second after infiltrating a military training exercise in Kuwait on Tuesday.

Avoid Italics

Designed to be more difficult to read, to slow down your reading process.

Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Times, 8pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Arial, 8pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Verdana, 8pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Times, 11pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Arial, 11pt
Four Score and Seven Years Ago - Verdana, 11pt

Although color is free online, be careful - also avoid Underlined Text

Kuwaiti Gunmen Slain After Killing U.S. Marine

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:34 p.m. ET

KUWAIT (AP) -- Two Kuwaiti gunmen in a pickup truck attacked U.S. forces during war games Tuesday on an island in the Persian Gulf, killing one Marine and wounding another before they were shot to death by U.S. troops. Kuwait called the assault a ``terrorist act.''

The Pentagon said the assailants pulled up to a group of Marines conducting urban assault training on Failaka, an uninhabited island off Kuwait's coast, and opened fire with small arms. They then drove to another site, stopped and attacked again before being killed by Marines, the Pentagon said.

Distinguish Text with Quotes, Bold, Bullets, or alternate Font

NYTimes Weather
3G Technology
Kuwaiti Gunmen

Making Text Scalable

Necessary and Easy

Text larger on PCs than Macs
Many people cannot read smaller text

Absolute size units: points, pixels, inches
Relative size units: percents, ems

You cannot control where text wraps online, so don't try

Stop Using FONT tag

Created by Netscape as non-standard add-on because they had difficulty implementing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

CSS now standard. Use style sheets instead of font tags.

Sample Style Sheet:

Print Conventions

Imitations

Drop-Caps:

Inconvenient to do without using graphics or complex HTML

NYTimes

Pullquotes:

Easy to do, but if they're long enough, just make them a separate page

Columns:

Also easy, but standard to use one long one.

KDE League Reinstated
Space Bridge

Indents:

Also easy, but standard to use double carriage return:

     The budget was sent by Pour on April 3, 2001, though the organization's fiscal year coincides with the calendar year, and was addressed to the "Board of Directors."
     "On behalf of the Executive Committee, we apologize for the long delay in proposing a budget to the Board," it began. "I hope you will agree that the budget is the best way to allocate the League's limited resources.
     Of course if you have good ideas as to other allocations or line-items, please let us know."

vs.

The budget was sent by Pour on April 3, 2001, though the organization's fiscal year coincides with the calendar year, and was addressed to the "Board of Directors."

"On behalf of the Executive Committee, we apologize for the long delay in proposing a budget to the Board," it began. "I hope you will agree that the budget is the best way to allocate the League's limited resources.

Of course if you have good ideas as to other allocations or line-items, please let us know."

As with font size, space is usually sacrificed for readability.

Differences

On Web, every page must stand-alone.

Users likely to come from Google, not home page.

Each page must contain ad, logo, blurb, toc, etc.

This results in more promotional text

Problems

Smart Quotes and other characters

In Word:
"I was sitting in Bob's café, when I heard a noise..."

In a browser:
ÖI was sitting in Bob¿s cafÐ, when I heard a noise¬Ü

Curly quotes and apostrophes must be replaced with straight ones.

Unicode

Original computers supported 7-bit character set.

1 bit = 0 or 1
2 bits = 0,1,2, or 3
3 bits = 2³ = 8 possible values
...
7 bits = 2⁷ = 128 possible values:
All upper- and lower-case letters, digits, punctuation marks.
No room for special characters, such as:
®, ¥, ¢, and ÷

Later systems had 8-bit character sets (256 characters), which included Greek and other European symbols

Newest systems use Unicode, a 16-bit character system with 2¹⁶ or 65,536 characters, including every letter of every alphabet on Earth.

You may edit your text using 8-bit or 16-bit character sets, and test it on your machine. It looks fine so you upload it, not realizing that it causes problems for users with older systems.

Incidentally, a byte is considered one character.
With an 8-bit character set, one byte = 8 bits. In Unicode, one byte = 16 bits.

Style

Length

purposefully break up pages for ad revenue shorter, come up with standard, say 500 words per page no more than 3 clauses per sentence, etc. more than 2 commas, break it up use more topic headings, every few paragraphs repurpose press releases, remove adjectives

Subjectivity

weblogs using 'I' in prose ackowledge subjectivity

Linking

title, teaser go to page essentially toc all over site break up links into clusters, no more than ten or so subdivide when necessary decide how to break up, by date may be easiest for you, but least useful for users