 |
Thursday, 22 August 2002 |
If you are dying to dip your toes into the waters of CSS, but are unsure of how to style your documents this way, try out the set of core CSS stylesheets that the W3C has provided for free.
Use the 8 samples provided as a beginning, and feel free to change the values as much as you like to see what happens. The stylesheets are pretty good—they were written by CSS guru Todd Fahrner. But I have to take issue—ri-shoo—with one aspect of them. I detest web pages where the text stretches all the way across the page, from extreme left to extreme right.
Text-heavy pages designed this way are the hardest of all to read, because they make the eye swivel left to right beyond the limits it is designed to. The P tag’s CSS definition should have its width set to an Em value based on the size and nature of the typeface set for the majority of the page’s body text. The traditional term for this is “setting the measure”.
The aim when setting the measure is to do it so that there is no more than 68 characters per line, depending on the typeface. Thus the maximum measure varies for each typeface. A good measure for Verdana is 35em. Georgia works well at 33em. Palatino should be set at 30em. Times—yuck, IMHO nobody should ever use Times for designing web pages meant to be read—needs to be set at 27em. And lastly, that ugly and crude bastard of a typeface named Arial should be set at 30em.
Here is a sample:
P {
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
width: 35em;
font-size: 12px;
font-weight: normal;
word-spacing: normal;
letter-spacing: normal;
text-transform: none;
line-height: 1.5em;
}
Notice that I have set a font family instead of just one font—Verdana. Verdana is one of the very best typefaces for screen reading, designed by the amazing Matthew Carter, but you cannot count on everyone having it installed on their computer, although most users will, especially those with Macs or Windows boxes.
11:01:47 AM 
|
|
“Final Cut Pro has democratized professional video editing by bringing the capabilities of a $50,000 editing bay to everyone for under $1,000,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “We are honored and excited to be receiving Apple’s second Emmy Award.”
Final Cut Pro running on Macintosh computers has changed everything in the film world, and has radically lowered the barriers to entry into filmmaking.
10:22:13 AM
|
|
Listening to the ABC radio station, and I am noticing in the current story a habit increasingly common amongst the more slack-jawed amongst us—no Rs.
“Let’s bawden the discussion and take a bawder pesspective,” said the interviewer. “That’s peffect,” replied one interviewee.
We’re all turning into Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.
10:05:53 AM
|
|
Some very surprising Windows to Apple switchers are included in the latest collection of true stories on the Apple website—an IS/IT support guy for IBM, and a “Windows network administrator and remote software installer responsible for supporting three very large customer networks.”
10:00:32 AM
|
|
A good Webmonkey overview of how to implement web standards without too much pain and hard work.
9:54:10 AM
|
|
In those Australian communities where the Irish presence is stronger, you may notice the way that people pronounce people is particularly odd. It is pronounced pay-pull.
I listen to the local ABC Radio National radio station sometimes in the morning, and most of the programs are about people—pay-pull—and their issues. Issues is most frequently prounced as ri-shoos, even when the word is not preceded by an R. Pay-pull and their ri-shoos.
9:39:47 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
|
|
|
