Michael C Berch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Realistically, the way to get people to adopt the whizzy new
> technologies is to create content that requires them. In this case,
> that means rich-text mail messages, MIME attachments, etc. A couple of
> years ago, I would have whined about someone sending a
> (reasonably-sized) GIF or JPG image to a mailing list I was on; now it's
> (usually) a pleasure.
Herein, I believe, lies the root of our disagreement. I've received lots
of huge Framemaker attachments, big GIFs I cared nothing about, text
marked up in formats that made it *harder* for me to read rather than
easier, and other similar annoyances. I've received very few encoded
messages where I actually cared about the encoded part enough to decode
it, let alone wish it were decoded for me automatically.
I find HTML text, properly rendered in a good browser that I've tweaked
with my own preferences, *harder* to read than straight ASCII text. I
*prefer* asterix markup to bold-face fonts, and _drastically_ prefer
underline notation to italic fonts, because available bold and italic
fonts suck for readability, and because screen fonts are normally small
enough that if you try to do something fancy like putting them in italics,
you render them incomprehensible.
Any typographer will tell you that the necessary font size for readability
is larger for an italic font than for a normal font.
It's *very*, *very* hard to beat straight, ordinary 9x15 non-proportional
X font for sheer readability on a computer screen.
People seem very attached to markup languages without any knowledge of the
HCI and human factors issues. (I'm not implying that about you, just
about the discussion I've often read about the issue.) I'd be very
interested in reading a defense of HTML text written by someone who does
not consider it fundamentally obvious that bold-face is superior to
*asterix* notation; until then, I have yet to see any defense written from
a perspective I can share basic principles with.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
