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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 06/09/05 00:22
On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Spartanicus wrote:
> Did you expect anyone to know what you were talking about based on
> what you wrote?
In the context of "one data point" it seemed as much as I needed.
The topic as far as I was concerned was to illustrate the fact that
displays are improving with time. Not to discuss in detail one
person's particular browsing habits, which is what this thread seems
to have degenerated into (apologies to other readers...)
> A "calibration in the OS" cannot reliably establish the actual
> resolution of a CRT viewing device
I'm not talking about its optical resolution, but the number of
increments of display co-ordinate per inch on the screen. This can be
(and in this case is) calibrated, with a ruler.
> since it does not take into account
> the granularity of the phosphor clusters.
Quite. That was not part of my "one data point".
> There most definitely is harm in setting the screen area setting at a
> value beyond what the CRT can display, information is lost when you do
> that. This may not be apparent by judging the result on esthetics, in
> fact it may even appear to be more pleasing to the eye, but you are
> deluding yourself.
Thank you for this interesting lecture.
Incidentally, I've been noticing increasingly that when I have
authors' styles enabled, they're tending more and more to propose
serif fonts, which in earlier times was rare. While I've often been
the first to complain about misguided choices by designers, this does
seem to convey some kind of message.
The bottom line, what I wanted to illustrate in this thread, was that
some of the details that one took for granted some years back may need
to be reconsidered in the light of the current situation. My
impression is that this particular issue is about ready for a
turnover, which is more or less what I said before. As it happens, I
still have a sans font configured myself as default (this one here is
Lucida Sans Unicode), I'm just making the point that a serif font is
not necessarily wrong, and soon may well be taken for granted just as
it is in paper publishing.
But whatever you say, I persist in my assertion that the user's own
choice of font is by definition their choice, and as authors it's our
job to work with that. If they choose Verdana then that's perfectly
fine by me, I see no reason to argue with them about it, but of course
they'll also need to choose their preferred size, and protect that
choice from inappropriate interference from other sources. If the
design then falls apart, it's not the user's fault.
The known problems with Verdana, as illustrated on Poley's
demonstration page, relate to authoring choices, not to user
choices - http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.html
An improved version of font-size-adjust would offer a possible
resolution of that issue, but instead of improving a flawed start,
most browser implementers ignored it entirely, and now the W3C have
taken it away altogether.
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