[thelist] .gif text

[Erin Kissane]

> There are two points of view about this. A lot of people say that all
> body text should be HTML text, not GIFs, and they're basically right.
> Text loads faster and can be read by robots and can be spoken 
> for blind
> people, for instance. On the other hand, there are many gorgeous sites
> out there where all the text is GIFs. I don't think you can 
> tie it down
> hard. If there's a lot of textual content on the page, then 
> it would be
> best as text. But you can be quite liberal with GIF images for
> sub-headings and headlines and so on, bearing in mind the 
> final size of
> your page.

This is a tricky issue.  The design I'm working on now uses gifs and pngs
(on supported user agents) for nav and CSS to control the text -- nav's
important and difficult to match up with a designer's expectation if you
stick with text-only.  Also, navigation is reused from page to page, so your
browser only has to load each image once, which speeds things up a lot.
Happily, most body-text effects can be handled with style sheets.  The main
issue with this design is trying to move the designers away from the concept
that they can completely control presentation -- a lot's been written about
thi, but the Dao of Design over at A List Apart
(http://www.alistapart.com/stories/dao/dao_1.html) is one of my favorites.


> There's an example of a site which I think is nicely laid out and
> designed which is ALL GIFs, no text. It's at:
> 
> <http://www.alwaysmac.com/mag/dec99/thefurnace/web/thefurnacefreewa.html>

I guess I have yet to see a gif-only page with substantial text that I could
live with.  The page above uses no alt tags (and so is totally inaccessible
to bots and anyone user a text reader).  And it didn't have to be that way
-- the fonts could have been matched closely and scaled with CSS.  Also, gif
text looks fuzzy to me, and the load times are awfully high -- it's a total
of 87k and takes about 25 seconds to load on a 56k.  That's a long time to
wait for text.

The difficult part, in the end, is making the mental shift to
less-restricted design and then persuading one's *clients* that it's the
right direction.  Most will listen to reason of you don't mess with their
logo and you keep them on a short leash on the web vs. print issue from the
beginning.

Erin