HTML: WEB typography

[Richard L. Goerwitz III]

> how is is short-sighted if you include Verdana, Arial, sans-serif? I am
> not saying use these as the cornerstone but that they are there in some
> cases and you have an option to take or not take this into account.

Minutiae of typography almost never have the amount of influence that
designers think they do.  And actually the whole point of content-based
markup schemes was, originally, to free people from having to worry
about such niggling details.

> Is it good design to consider what somone has or bad design to ignore
> them because they may have it?

This issue has been heavily debated since the 80s.  It won't be resol-
ved here.  Typically, though, you expect librarians to know about things
like SGML, XML, stylesheets - and to recognize intuitively why they are
a big gain.  You also expect them to understand the secondary status of
things like whether a font has serifs or not.

I have to admit I was pretty thoroughly surprising when I saw postings here
that asked, e.g., why anyone would bother with CSSs or XML.

But then this is just me.  Doubtless the folks sitting on the other side
of the fence will find my sentiments to be equally surprising.

Richard Goerwitz
Brown University