Doug Franklin wrote: > 1) Don't put font or color attributes (other than STRONG, EM, SMALL, > BIG, etc.) in your pages ... let the default settings of the viewer's > browser do their thing. It might be boring but it comes closest of all > to ensuring that every browser can render the page readably.
I see nothing wrong with using such attributes but you do need to be careful about it. Some of the lesser-known tags will be rendered as either italic, bold, or whatever the browser implemented. If a browser doesn't recognise a tag, it will be ignored. It seems that a number of more common tags may be giving way to CSS in the future so backward/forward compatibility is not guaranteed... > 2) When you absolutely insist on specific colors or fonts, create a > small graphic file (e.g., GIF) containing the text with those > attributes and load it in the web page. This falls apart on Lynx and > screen readers, though. Specific fonts are hard as there is no guarantee that your audience will have the font you require. But if that is the case, the browser will just fall-back on its default. The page will look a little uglier (or less ugly, depending on your design skill) but it'll still work. Images are one way around this but are bigger (thus taking longer to load). We should always be using alt tags for those using text-based browsers (or browse with images turned off). Specific colours, OTOH, are no better or worse than using images. If you make a GIF image in Photoshop with some fully-red text then you might as well just specify red text in your HTML (either using "red" or "#FF0000"). Both will look the same, colour-wise, on a given system. Cheers, - Dave David A. Mann, B.E. (Elec) "Why is it that if an adult behaves like a child they lock him up, while children are allowed to run free on the streets?" -- Garfield - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
