Teaching and Publishing in the World Wide Web
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The major problem faced by Web authors is that it is impossible to predict how a Web page will appear to any particular reader. Each reader of a document may see it formatted in a somewhat different way. How a page appears to a reader depends on the reader's computer platform, capabilities of his graphics card, his choice of Web browser, and the options he chooses to set on his browser.
For example, if you are viewing this page with graphics turned off, then you aren't seeing the parchment-like background. Perhaps worse, if you have only a 16-color graphics card, then the background appears splotchy and you are wondering why I made such a mess of my document.
Modern word processing software has turned us all into amateur typographers. Writers now worry about typefaces, point size, indents, em dashes, and leading. When writing for the World Wide Web, an author need not be concerned with this arcana of the typographer's art. For some, this lack of control over the presentation of the text will be an insurmountable obstacle. For others, the limitations of WWW formatting will be overridden by the advantages of the hypertext links to other networked information sources.
As discussed earlier, logical text elements in HTML include paragraphs, headings, and lists. The way in which these elements are presented to the reader is determined by the reader's choice of browser and browser options. Some browsers allow the user to assign a typeface and point size to different logical elements. Some browsers allow the user to control the color of different text elements and to set the amount of white space surrounding a heading. These are merely ways of breaking the monotony of continuous text. The choices made by the reader generally cannot be controlled or negated by the author.
Web pages today appear more and more like the pages of magazines. Formatting appears to be colorful and elegant. Much of this control of page elements derives from creative use of tables to position text and graphics. However, the most careful placement of text can be totally destroyed by the reader if he chooses a default font size that differs significantly from the one the author had in mind. It is now possible for an author to use style sheets to prevent a reader from altering the size of the display font. However, this is often unwise as the resulting page may be illegible on the reader's screen. The default font size might look perfectly fine on your monitor when you are creating your page. But on my 21-inch monitor set for 1600x1200 pixel resolution the font might be far too small for me to read with my aging eyes. Text on graphics buttons also becomes unreadably small on some author's pages.
When creating pages that contain more than simple textual elements, it is important to check the appearance of the page on more than one Web browser, and preferably on more than one computer platform using different size monitors running at different resolutions. To neglect such testing when formatting graphically complex pages is to risk losing significant parts of your potential audience.
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Revised: December 28, 1999
Harry_M_Kriz
, [hmkriz@vt.edu]