Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 07/16/06 12:34

On Sun, 16 Jul 2006, Andrew wrote:

> Still a battle to render Ancient Greek well I guess,

You seem to be going the right way about representing your source
material in HTML, and in a way that will reduce maintenance
commitments in the future, as you don't seem to be applying any
kludges to the content to pacify current browsers but which might
become counter-productive as browsers improve. I'd rate that highly.
There are far too many legacy quasi-HTML pages on the web which relied
on old browser bugs, and now in desperate need of maintenance.

As for your well-intentioned experiments in choosing fonts on behalf
of the user, I'd have to rate this as a two-edged sword.

For the average non-specialist user with recent versions of the fonts
that you are working with, it may well be that your font proposals
will produce better results, indeed.

However, those who had an inferior version of one of the fonts that
come earlier in your list, while having a better version of a font
that comes later in your list, would get unfortunate consequences.

However, for a specialist who has acquired their favourite
Unicode-compatible font for polytonic Greek, your proposals rate to
make things worse, by choosing an inferior font which they happen to
have, rather than the one that they had gone out of their way to
choose.

I generally recommend to specialist readers in this kind of situation
to disable author-specified fonts in their browser, and configure the
browser to use the font which they desired. However, that then
defeats /all/ font changes proposed by the author, which may be
overkill, and removes some harmless site-specific visual benefits.

Have you considered offering alternative stylesheets? Quite a number
of browsers have support for that feature of CSS (Moz/Firefox and
Opera to name just some). You might need to offer a link to a "tips
on browsing this site"-type page, in which you talk about the use of
"alternate stylesheets" (as they're rather confusingly[1] termed in
the specs), since not every reader would be familiar with them.

best regards

[1] I say "confusing" because, in British English, "alternate" means
first the one, then the other, by turns. "alternative" means "choose
one from the two which are offered" (or, if not being too pedantic,
"choose one from several"). In US usage it seems the terms are used
more or less interchangeably.

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