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Posted by Harlan Messinger on 06/16/60 11:42
Martin Underwood wrote:
>
> Therein lies the problem: expecting web sites to be read on a very wide
> variety of browers and devices, rather than saying that for a browser to be
> a browser it has to conform to a very tightly-controlled standard.
Why should information be made less useful and less accessible? Why, for
example, should you want so badly to force people to sit at full screens
at their desks in order to get information, preventing them from
accessing it comfortably via their handhelds? Why should you waste your
time laying out an entire web site for a presumed screen resolution that
three years from now may be laughable, that may take up all of three
inches on a 17-inch monitor and be illegible? Why should I specially
have to turn zoom on to read your pages?
> I know
> HTML isn't meant to be a page layout language - my question is "why isn't
> it?".
That's like asking why the Unicode standard for encoding the elements of
writing systems isn't meant to be a standard for spelling. It is what it
is and it isn't something else, and the reason it was developed as it
was is because there was a need for such a thing. If someone has
information to convey, most of the time there is no reason for the
person to be concerned with how that information *looks* to the person
reading it.
> If I send a Word document, I don't expect people to be able, at a stroke, to
> alter the sizes of all my fonts - apart from zooming in and out of the whole
> page - thus destroying my carefully-crafted page layout.
That's because word processing exists to prepare documents for printing
on paper. The Web does not exist for that purpose. Word processing is
the product of a time before the vast majority of people had computers,
had network access, had e-mail. *Now* you can send word processing
documents via the Internet or post them on a local network, but that's
incidental.
To illustrate further the really low importance of formatting in the
general scheme of things when information is transmitted through the
Internet, consider that even now that almost everyone *has* a word
processing application, most individuals send information through
*e-mail*. Usually plain-text e-mail. At most emphasis is shown, maybe by
surrounding a word or phrase in *asterisks*, and even then it's of no
concern to me how that looks on the other end (for example, most people
will see the asterisks; some clients might display the word boldface as
well--which is a user-configurable option!--but most won't). Page design
is the last thing on my mind when I send a note, a recipe, an invitation
to a friend.
Page layout has its (important) functions, but there's nothing
surprising about the existence of an elementary method of encapsulating
information without layout being a consideration.
> I wish browsers had
> been designed with page layout given as much thought as content.
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