Web Typography?
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- boobs
So I read this Mark Boulton article ( http://24ways.org/2013/run-ragge… ), and I was really struck by the level of attention he puts into his web typography. To ensure he gets nice clean even rags, without awkward line breaks.
Do you put anywhere near Boulton's level of attention in? Or do you pay any attention to these issues? Or do you just let things fall where they may?
- bored2death0
How many people work with that much text?
- ESKEMA0
Horseshit. There's so much you can do on the web, I try to get the basics, but ultimately, stuff is going to break. Even his site breaks what he's saying if you resize the browser. A Printed book is a solid finished product, with a lot of control to what the final product look like. There are so many variables on the web about the final output that spending an afternoon breaking your lines is pointless, if seen on another system and browser will get you different results. I'm not saying attention to detail is to be ignored, just that you can't possibly achieve the level of control that print has over text.
- Continuity0
I know where he's coming from. We all like fantastic typesetting.
But this is the fucking web we're talking about, and it's not a motherfucking piece of paper.
Reading this makes me fucking cringe, actually. In the same way web designers cringe whenever their print-background art director comes into the room.
In fact, I've been there.
Print art director: 'You've got rivers in this paragraph of copy. In fact, you've got rivers all over the website.'
Me: 'Too bad. Deal with it.'
What makes me furious about this article is the misrepresentation of web typesetting as being on equal footing with its print opposite number.
For one, neither HTML nor CSS have ever been friendly to type. It took us forever to get some fucking basics included in either of those specs, like line height and columns (and I still don't trust columns cross-browser). Missing in action: FUCKING KERNING.
The other thing that makes me see red with this article is the fact he seems to think that once you've flowed copy onto a page with his   hacks, it's 'Hey presto, job done'. Well, guess what: it's not job done, you fucking cock-nosher. Web agencies sell clients a CMS with their website, and do you seriously think Dear Client will have any time or inclination to implement your fucking hack?
Fucking hell.
- You can eliminate rivers without fancy type tricks or anything.monospaced
- Not totally true about kerning. CSS 'letter-spacing' property. There is also the CSS3 'font-kerning' propertyETM
- As I understand it, font-kerning is one of those not-too-commonly implemented things cross-browser.Continuity
- I could be wrong, though.Continuity
- dMullins0
^ I agree with Continuity in full.
The hack isn't really semantic markup either. Also, there's several ways to accomplish what he's babbling about here with Javascript. Fuck CSS, long live Javascript.
- dMullins0
^ oops, clearly I skipped over the part where he linked Ragadjust.js
- Continuity0
^ I don't even know why he even bothered writing this drivel about if he was going to end it all by linking to that JS file anyway.
My expletive-filled rant still stands.
- freedom0
What if the viewer is on IE?
- vaxorcist0
I once worked with a designer who would ONLY do flash websites for this typography reason. Then we ended up having to write a CMS to generate XML that fed into the flash templates, resulting in lots of actionscript/PHP/XML to detect short words and line-breaks, but at least we had a fixed viewport, but then the client needed it to work on other devices and we had to write another rendering engine from the XML to output to, uh, plain old HTML with line-breaks wherever, because it was feeding into all sorts of non-compliant systems all over due to the XML/RSS business requirements, and the idea that we're sharing content,etc...
So, the precious perfect world we built at great labor was not likely to last long in a real business environment....
- boobs0
So, the basic verdict is "fuck it?"