Re: Seriffed and sans-serif fonts?

Michal Young ([email protected])
Wed, 19 Apr 1995 15:21:29 +0500


>Examples of usage of text and idioms are given in seriffed fonts.
>Comments on the utilisation and the parts of speech, ie. the
>annotation itself, needs to be rendered in a sans-serif font.
>It doesn't really matter which: universe, avant-garde, helvetica,
>geneva, etc.

Isn't this what style sheets are all about? You define a hierarchy of
logical tags that distinguishes between examples and comments, and you give
suggested fonts for each. The user can override them (perhaps the user is
running a text-to-speech browser and prefers a female voice for examples
and a male voice for comments), but the map to actual fonts/characteristics
should match the "shape" of your hierarchy of logical tags.

Am I misunderstanding the basic ideas here?

>Can we introduce a new mechanism? <ss> (for sans-serif)?

The last thing we need is a proliferation of hard-wired physical formatting
tags -- there is just no end to it. An extensible logical tagging system
can always be subverted for physical tagging, but it's very hard to recover
logical structure from physical tags.

----------------------
Michal Young
Purdue University
Software Engineering Research Center
Department of Computer Sciences
1398 Computer Science Building
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1398
voice: 317-494-6023
fax: 317-494-0739
URL: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/young
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