[thelist] Liquidity and giftext

[Ben Henick]

My two cents/pence/pfennig on this whole table-design issue...

I've seen too many table crashes in Netscape.  I wait hopefully for the
day when Netscape 4 and all of its inconsistencies are finally dead and
buried.

To further complicate matters my sites tend to see a lot of Netscape
traffic and so I remain mighty sensitive to Netscape on the theory that
you reap what you sow.  Certainly not because I like it, anyway.

Thus, I try to "speak" to the rendering engine in the simplest forms
possible which means that I code tables to explicit widths, making sure
that my *real* body content is never more than 576px across.

When I use spacer .gifs their purpose is to provide a reference to the
rendering engine that it can't ignore (if it is in fact necessary).

If a user's running say 1280x1024 fullscreen then they get a lot of
white space on the left and right margins of the page.  I've never
taken a poll, but common sense and experience suggest that this can do
a lot to make text content much, much more readable than if I was using
a single, "liquid" column for my body content.

As for giftext:  if you need to apply filters/effects, that's a better
way to go. "Font smoothing" is right up there with "stable WinOS" in my
book.  ID, heads, captions, and navbars.

But... Has anyone on the list had the opportunity to work with font
embedding?  I've seen it used on word.com and (duh) bitstream.com but
am naturally reluctant to consider it as a design option until I can
make some predictions as to how well it can actually be implemented in
MY projects (e.g. little/no financial or logistical support as regards
production).

Luckily I have yet to deal with a client who's insisted on the
extensive use of a particular typeface in body copy... but wouldn't
mind having an option if it should come to pass.




=====
Ben Henick              |  "In the long run, men hit only
Web Author At-Large     |  what they aim at.  Therefore,
www.io.com/persist1/    |  though they should fail
persist1 at io.com         |  immediately, they had better aim
persist1_pdx at yahoo.com  |  high."  --Henry David Thoreau

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://im.yahoo.com/