Same As It Ever Was
Published 13 years, 5 months pastI recently became re-acquainted with a ghost, and it looked very, very familiar. In the spring of 1995, just over a year into my first Web gig and still just over a year away from first encountering CSS, I wrote the following:
Writing to the Norm
No, not the fat guy on “Cheers.” Actually, it’s a fundamental issue every Web author needs to know about and appreciate.
Web browsers are written by different people. Each person has their own idea about how Web documents should look. Therefore, any given Web document will be displayed differently by different browsers. In fact, it will be displayed differently by different copies of the same browser, if the two copies have different preferences set.
Therefore, you need to keep this principle foremost in your mind at all times: you cannot guarantee that your document will appear to other people exactly as it does to you. In other words, don’t fall into the trap of obsessively re-writing a document just to get it to “fit on one screen,” or so a line of text is exactly “one screen wide.” This is as pointless as trying to take a picture that will always be one foot wide, no matter how big the projection screen. Changes in font, font size, window size, and so on will all invalidate your attempts.
On the other hand, you want to write documents which look acceptable to most people. How? Well, it’s almost an art form in itself, but my recommendation is that you assume that most people will set their browser to display text in a common font such as Times at a point size of somewhere between 10 and 15 points. While you shouldn’t spend your time trying to precisely engineer page arrangement, you also shouldn’t waste time worrying about how pages will look for someone whose display is set to 27-point Garamond.
That’s from “Chapter 1: Terms and Concepts” of Introduction to HTML, my first publication of note and the first of three tutorials dedicated to teaching HTML in a friendly, interactive manner. The tutorials were taken down a couple of years ago by their host organization, which made me a bit sad even though I understood why they didn’t want to maintain the pages (and deal with the support e-mail) any longer.
However, thanks to a colleague’s help and generosity I recently came into possession of copies of all three. I’m still pondering what to do about it. To put them back on the web would require a bit more work than just tossing them onto a server, and to make the quizzes fully functional would take yet more work, and after all this time some of the material is obsolete or even potentially misleading. Not to mention the page is laid out using a table (woo 1995!). On the other hand, they’d make an interesting historical document of sorts, a way to let you young whippersnappers know what it was like in the old days.
Reading through them, now sixteen years later, has been an interesting little trip down memory lane. What strikes me most, besides the fact that my younger self was a better writer than my current self, is how remarkably stable the Web’s fluidity has been over its lifetime. Yes, the absence of assuredly-repeatable layout is a core design principle, but it’s also the kind of thing that tends to get engineered away, particularly when designers and the public both get involved. Its persistence hints that it’s something valuable and even necessary. If I had to nominate one thing about the Web for the title of “Most Under-appreciated”, I think this would be it.
Comments (4)
If you require any volunteers, I would be happy to help.
I’m not familiar with the tutorials, but it would be interesting to see how things have changed or stayed the same.
I would imagine a lot of people would be very interested in having the opportunity to read those tutorials, I know I am.
Having worked in the field for “only” 13 years it would be great fun to read something about web development that was written before I started working with it.
Looking forward to possibly see it published on your site eventually.
I am also confident the are several people out there that would be glad to help in making it possible. My suggestion, put up a zip with all the files and let people choose what parts they want to work on and see if you end up with something useful.
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