Channel Niners!
_______________________________
I started this site with a few Web pages to try to show how Font Embedding on the Web could really improve Web readability, and enable new creativity in site design.
What began with that simple aim quickly morphed into an exploration of how readable you could make the Web using only standards-compliant markup.
I created the first pages with a print-publishing application, merely to show Embedded OpenType at work, and they amply met my initial criteria.
Internet Explorer automatically downloaded the EOT font objects, and displayed the text in the right fonts.
Provided the pages were viewed on a resolution better than 1440 x 900, they looked very good, and were highly readable.
They and all later pages were designed to be viewed Full Screen (F11 in Internet Explorer and FireFox, unfortunately not available in Chrome or Safari).
But wow – did I stir up a hornets’ nest!
When I posted a pointer on the Internet Explorer blog, you would have thought I’d been cruel to puppies.
I don’t mind people being critical. I do mind them being rude, or using me as an excuse to vent their favorite Microsoft conspiracy theory. But the critics did make one excellent point. The HTML was bloated and incomprehensible to humans. My colleague Chris Wilson created a Web-standards version of one of the pages which was only a fifth the size of the original. And the HTML was simple enough that even I could understand it.
That made up my mind. Time to get my hands dirty and learn much more about HTML, CSS and what you could do on the Web using entirely standards-compliant code.
That’s especially relevant since Internet Explorer 8 uses standards rendering by default, and has now shipped. The pages “sort of work” in other browsers, but they’re really optmized for IE8. Minor differences between browsers can cause problems even with standards-compliant markup.
These pages show my journey of exploration. If you go through them in order, you’ll see my learning process.
The first two sets are now dead-ended. The others are works in progress. I plan to regularly update the blog. I’ve created almost 70 Web pages so far, about half of the book, and I’d like to complete that project.
I copied the text from Project Gutenberg, which has done a fabulous job of digitizing texts – but whose plain-text format is just about unreadable. So I tried to see how much better I could make it using only standards markup.
There’s still plenty to be done; for instance, I know paginated content is better than scrolling to read, but I don’t like the fixed size of the pages I’ve done so far. The layout needs to become adaptive, which you can see in the New York Times Reader, but not yet on the Web.
Here are the links to all the pages so far.
- First non-standards pages
- First standards-compliant pages
- A more readable blog
- A book
- A news magazine article
The other piece missing from this site is a comments page, because I’d like to start a dialog with others who want to make the Web more readable. I haven’t got round to implementing that yet – it’s next on my list of things to learn.
Until then, if you want to post comments, you’ll have to use Channel9, my conventional blog, The Future of Reading, or join my OnScreen Reading discussion group on FaceBook.
“Human vision has been evolving for millions of years, and won’t suddenly change completely over the course of millenia, never mind a mere couple of decades...”
I’ve had people attack the kind of layout you’re reading right now as if it was somehow clinging desperately to outmoded conventions in a world that’s changed from print to screen. They just don’t get it. Human vision has been evolving for millions of years, and won’t suddenly change completely over the course of millenia, never mind a mere couple of decades...
That’s good news! It means most of the parameters we know from past experience still work. We just need to learn how to adapt them to a new environment.