Some simple uses of CSS technology.

Prologue

Starting at a very early age, I developed a strong interest in the written and printed word, as presented in books available at the local library. Over the years this interest has expanded to cover principles of text presentation and the techniques used to produce the thoughts of a human mind in a form that makes it easy to read and understand by others.

---

Basics of text presentation

The basic rules for presentation of text here in the western part of the world have evolved through an historical process where the early church and especially its monasteries has had a major influence.

Highly skillful monks at these monasteries developed methods to do their handwriting of books so that they were able to keep the text structured and presented in a way that it was both beautiful and highly readable to the human eye.

Keypoints in history

It should be noted that introduction of a printing technique has not changed many of the basic rules of text presentation as originally laid down in monk hand writings. Open a book with a good quality typesetting today, and you will still find serifed letters in lower case, and first line paragraph indents, properly leaded to give the eye a secure path to follow when changing from line to line.

Historical evoulution . . .

• Serifs on letters. An invention that goes back to the Roman Empire, serifs helps the human eye to form "pictures of words" for easier reading.
• Invention of "lower case" letters in the period of 600-800 a.d. made it possible to increase the density of information on a given area of the media used for distribution, without losing any part of its readability. As an added bonus, the lower case letters where easier to draw, thus increasing the speed of production.
• Introduction of the "first line of paragraph indent" at around 1200 a.d. This replaced an earlier method of using a special character to indicate start of new paragraph. The net result once again was enhanced readability.
• Evolution of the printing technique in the 14th century dramatically increased the potential to distribute information on a wider base.

---

Connection to CSS

Its said by many that textual information is much more difficult to read on a modern VDU than from a printed media. That's true naturally and best explained by the fact of a large difference in graphical resolution between these two media.

Still "old" basic rules of text presentation do hold true, regardless of the resolution of the media used for visual communication. And its in this area, among some others, that CSS can be used to suggest a proper presentation of written text, but with a few exceptions.

Serif'ed types

The WWW is supposed to be a media where the end user has the final say about presentation, this is by config settings in the users web browser. A deliberate change of the users prefered font setting can be suggested through a CSS rule but I would not recommend any one to actually do so. The user has most probably found the font that he/she prefer to use and most closely suits their own level of reading capability.

I can make an exception for a suggestion to deliberatley change into a generic sans-serif font for presentation of headlines or list contents, that's all.

Still I would say that the major problem of "fiddling" with users font settings lies in current browser implementations, since they have great problems when it comes to substituting proper fonts for non-existent ones, or to handle generic font rules for that matter, as specified in style rules.

In short, avoid font changes while using CSS.

Indents

Using a 1em sized "first line of paragraph" indent is a technique that can be traced back to old monk handwritings as said above.

The sad thing about this is that so far there is only one browser version available where the programmers seems to have understood the idea behind the relative measurment 1em. The other so called "style aware" browsers available, each one decides to make their own private mess of this universally accepted typographical unit of size.

Can it be used then? Well, yes, but be prepared to accept a limitation on the size of the audience that can actually see the suggested presentation.

At least one of the "major" browsers available can be totally excluded from reading a proposed stylesheet and that may be one way to isolate a faulty way of interpreting a suggested styling.

The good thing of that is that the "content" of the web page will still be fully available to anyone, but only the user with the "correct" browser may get a rendering based on the suggested style.

---

Epilogue

I have touched only a few items of text styling, through tradition and by using a modern tool like CSS. Still, these basics of presentation run into som big problems when interpreted by available software.

The debate around CSS today seems to be more circulating around possible ways to circumvent and isolate browser deficiencies then how the CSS tool should be used in the first place to enhance presentation.

I have my own personal opinion on the reasons "behind the curtain" and that is the simple fact the "Mosaic spawn" of "HTML command driven" browsers are just not suitable to have CSS technology added to them. There is no such thing as an "HTML command" in the first place, browser programmers should make a note of that.

A fully CSS capable browser needs first of all an HTML parser to generate a structured tree of elements where one can make a late binding of CSS presentational suggestions to these elements just before rendering on the media at hand.

There's a big need to start all over, from scratch, and do it right this time. The alternative? Well CSS might never make it into what it was designed to be.