Knew the Way... August 15 2008
_______________________________
W hy does reading a blog have to have be a slog? Why does it have to have a boring, hard–to–read, single–column layout? Why can’t a blog be as easy to read as a quality magazine? Short answer: There’s no reason at all.
Longer answer: No-one’s really spent the time and effort to implement the remaining pieces of technology we need.
There are really no unknowns left. It’s simply a matter of resource and execution.
This blog’s about trying to show what the Readable Web might look like. It began as a private experiment, to try out some ideas and develop some production methods using my 30 or so years of experience in newspaper and magazine production. (I knew it would come in handy again, one day...)
Although they were posted on the Web, there were no public links from my main site to these pages. I decided to use the opportunity of being interviewed on Channel9 to open them up and get comments and ideas from others. If you want to see the embedded fonts working, you’ll need to instal:
Internet Explorer EightApologies up front. There are still some rough edges. The multicolumn layout uses CSS3 multicolumn support right at the bleeding edge of evolving Web standards, using a Javascript we found on the Web (Copyright © 2005 Cedric Savarese). My colleague Sylvain Galineau modified it to work with Internet Explorer. So you’ll see the odd bit of cross-column wackiness until we get it fully sorted out.
The layout also needs to eventually become adaptive, so it doesn’t matter what size of screen you have. We’ll get there, but we’re not there yet.
550 Years of Evolution
People have been making readable documents using type for at least a thousand years. Gutenberg didn’t invent printing 550 years ago; the Koreans had moveable clay type in the year 1024AD. Gutenberg invented a metal alloy which could be quickly and easily cast (and melted down and recast) to create as many letters as you needed to set pages of type.
The resulting information explosion triggered a process of Darwinian evolution.
Many experiments were tried (and many failed) until we settled on a size for body text that’s about 11 points, and a column width of between 55 and 65 characters, for material to be read at normal reading distance of about 50cm.
Those sizes weren’t random. Subsequent scientific research showed that reading uses the foveal area of the human retina. It’s only 0.2mm in diameter, and it was this critical dimension which eventually drove type to settle down at the sizes in common use today. These aren’t merely printers’ conventions, but optimization for human vision and the way we train it in order to read.
“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.