On July 25, 2003 04:50 am, Robin Turner wrote:
<a little snip>
The main factor in compatibility both ways is fonts and CSS. You can get a much better appearance on Windows by using fonts that Windows handles well. Tahoma and Verdana are good choices. You should also provide a lit of fonts in your CSS, though of course you can't do that in WYSIWYG editors (well, maybe Amaya?). Set font sizes as relative, not absolute. I find a base font size of 90% gives the best overall results,
Self-correction - for text, I now prefer ems to percentages. The tricky thing, as I've just found out trying to get a page to display well at different resolutions on different OSs and browsers, is making text and graphics play nice, since graphic measurement generally goes in pixels.
Actually MS likes Times New Roman and the old non-serif font that was, at one point, standard with Winsucks.
I usually have Times New Roman as an option for large chunks of text. but it's not actually a very nice font - it was based on newspaper fonts, which have rather tight kerning for web display. Of course you can set kerning in CSS2, but how many browsers support that?
I wish Donald Knuth would design some web fonts ;-)
By all means use everything suggested here to test which one you like best. I believe even Web Sphere comes with a kinda stripped down evaluation package which gives you an idea of how it works. No NOT under pain of much torture, death and abuse use Front Page or Word as your HTML editor. Just to repeat myself DON'T! :-)
Absolutely. When I first got on the Web, I used to save documents I'd written in Word as HTML then upload them. People from all over the world took the trouble to e-mail me about it!
Do use relative font sizes.
Yes, and remember that many people have screen resolutions that will make your default fault look ridiculously large. Then there are a few people who use Konqueror, which makes everything microscopic.
Do remember to use serif fonts for any text longer than one short paragraph. There are valid reasons for this. The biggest one is that the serifs make it easier for the eye to track what the user is reading. That's why you see them everywhere.
Use san serif fonts for headlines, headers and little extractions only.
I agree with this for print, but I'm not sure how much it applies on the web.
Read bags of information on just how to design a web site. Most people haven't got a clue, to be honest. Don't take hint's on this from Portals. They are both a crime against sanity and a wonderful example of how not to design a site.
Certainly. The same goes for most corporate websites. As someone said on BBC's Click Online programme, "The bigger the company, the worse the website."
DO read and absorb everything you find on www.useit.com. Jakob Neilsen is kinda cranky but he's usually right about what does and does not make a usable web site.
But his site looks incredibly ugly. I had to check the source code to make sure he was using CSS - he seems to have written a stylesheet designed to recall the good old days of Mosaic ;-). I'd still say the best place to start is the W3C (www.w3.org). It's a bit of a labyrinth, but there is a ton of good information and advice there. Check out the CSS Zen Garden for some eye-candy!
Sir Robin
-- "A strategy is still being formulated."
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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