Sent by The Moose on 8 February 2003 04:04
Hello,
I collect replies to several people in one post to economize on space.
Felix said:
| Your palette harmonizes nicely with my KDE theme. :-) With Tahoma not
| available, the substituted font renders much shorter, about two full
| lines.
I used only Tahoma and sans-serif. What is the most common cross-platform sans-serif font, if any?
PC+Mac would be good enough.
Philippe suggested:
| Instead of using left/top top position the divs, use margin-left/margin-top.
I have a question then. If a box is positioned relatively, with position explicitly specified, am I
permitted to omit the offsets? If I limit myself to margins only, can I drop the "position:
relative" rule altogether? What is the proper thing to do?
Matt commented:
| I like the whole two-colour / clipping effect you have with the big
| letters, even if it goes against the whole idea of stylesheets because you
| have to create two copies of the first letter to achieve the effect. It
| reminds of that idea of creating text shadows by creating two copies of the
| word / sentence and setting an offset between the two. Speaking of which,
| do any browsers support the 'text-shadow' attribute yet? Matt
I am not sure about the idea of stylesheets. Aren't they supposed to handle presentation? CSS is
rich stylistically enough for boxes of all kinds (though not for eggs, or rounded shapes), but the
text model is a poor relation by comparison. The choices are extremely limited, and what choices we
have are often not supported. Text shadow is only one effect amongst those I presented, and should
such property be supported, that official effect could replace my offset, or be combined with it.
Icons and images are used everywhere on the web as ornamentations without any real content behind
them. Not so with text because it has not been possible. Isn't usage of aligned images (aligned via
html hacks OR css) just a gimmick? If we look at lists, they have CSS styling provided, enabling us
to use images to ornament them. With text, we are down to :first-letter or :first-line if we do not
want to use images. That is an incredibly ascetic choice. Assuming that the support for
:first-letter were full and universal, what options do we have? Stylistic options, that is. How many
colors per letter can I use? Only one, unfortunately. The examples I used use minimal markup; I used
two distinct ways to mark the positioned letter-containers. Depending on the purpose (first letter
or a block), they can be used in two different contexts that will alow the designer to control the
degrade should the styles be unavailable. Under that condition, the page still makes sense. In
addition, resizing text resizes the large letters as well, proportionately, which is not really
possible with images (Opera does resize images under zoom, true, but it quickly leads to *horrible*
losses in resolution and readabilty). The purpose of this example, and of the CSS Alphabet was to
extend the presentationial possibilities of the designers while minimizing side-effects that are
inevitable in any such extension.
Of course, any such approach will *never* be universal, which I humbly accept :):)
many thanks for the comments & critiques!
Wojtek
