Subject:
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Re: Typefaces: Verdana vs. Times
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.publish
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Date:
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Sat, 17 Apr 1999 18:06:26 GMT
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Viewed:
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1379 times
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In lugnet.publish, rueger@io.com (Tim Rueger) writes:
> All true. It's the "careful attention to backward compatibility" that
> bugs me. HTML is supposed to be device independent, so you don't *need*
> to worry about these details.
It still is, and you still don't need to unless you really want to. That's
the winning beauty of it.
Unfortunately, when people ignore compatibility, it's usually that they're
using new features and forgetting about backward compatibility rather than
using only old features and forgetting about forward compatibility. :) But
new features are seductive to almost everyone. And people are paid to use
new features. What can you do?
> Sure, tags enable new features without breaking older browsers, but you
> know most designers don't give a whit about older browsers.
Unfortunately, they're not often paid to. They're typically designing under
tight deadlines and limited budgets for particular target market segments.
This is a major bummer for some viewers, but it's the way the design market
works, and it doesn't really make the extensions themselves inherently bad
or wrong, nor does it mean that everyone has to abuse or ignore the
extensions. It just means that some sites are more restrictive than others
in how well the content behaves across platforms, which may or may not fit
the site owner's specifications.
> Heck, Intel
> is actually encouraging websites "optimized" for Pentium III CPUs.
Don't these sites go beyond vanilla hypertext and into multimedia anyway?
Maybe the thing to be worried most about there is whether or not the plug-
ins that take advantage of the PIII chips are cross-platform code or
Winblows-specific code, and whether or not the content is a cross-
platform language like VRML or some bogo-proprietary binary format.
> And
> the latest IE (IIRC) lets websites customize the entire browser user
> interface on a *per site* basis. Ick!
Well, one way of looking at it is that this is really gross and terrible,
because it's a complete bastardization of what HTML and web was originally
meant to be.
Another way of looking at it is that it's a first step toward moving actual
applications off the desktop and onto the web. 10 years from now, how much
HTML will sites will be made of? For better or for worse, there's going to
be less and less HTML (as a percentage of overall content) and more and more
downloadable applications code fragments (Java and other languages).
> Guess I'm an old fogie already, and I'm only 31. "Yessiree, I can
> remember back in '89, when you had to send email explicitly thru
> RELAY.CS.NET to get it from coast to coast...".
Can you still do that?
> > Well, everything looks good on a Mac. :)
>
> *snort* I'll take that as a compliment on behalf of my chosen
> platform...
Indeed it is.
--Todd
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Typefaces: Verdana vs. Times
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| (...) Websites that intentionally exclude the largest possible audience will lose in the marketplace. eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo seem to do just fine with plain old HTML, why shouldn't anyone else? (...) The designer had better be serious about those (...) (26 years ago, 19-Apr-99, to lugnet.publish)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Typefaces: Verdana vs. Times
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| (...) All true. It's the "careful attention to backward compatibility" that bugs me. HTML is supposed to be device independent, so you don't *need* to worry about these details. Sure, tags enable new features without breaking older browsers, but you (...) (26 years ago, 17-Apr-99, to lugnet.publish)
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