Print vs. electronic publishing (was: Splash Pages)

* David Meadows <david(at)goldenheroes.softnet.co.uk> writes:
> Mic Miller <mic(at)bton.com> writes:

>> with a Gerber label (but without the condescendenc)].  Let's keep
>> something in mind, this is the new digital media.  There are no
>> rules, just us folks who interact.  I, for one, will not expect to
>> see a "Chicago Manual of Style" for the Net.  God forbide such
>> Draconian thoughts!

> Draconian??? I welcome the idea of a "Chicago..." for the Web!

Give me CSS for everyone and I'll give you a CMS for e-publishing.

> Chicago, or *any* style manual, does not stifle creativity. If it
> did, there would not be such a marvellous diversity of books on our
> shelves.

That is not entirely correct. The CMS is very interesting, in particular
for scientific material (duh...), but have you ever wondered why, say,
German books look so much different from yours?  Because our style guide
is not the CMS but the works of Jan Tschichold. Create a LaTeX document with
the standard styles and with the KOMA-Script styles and you'll notice
the difference.

> What a style manual does is ensure that your creative output is
> clear, consistent, and *accessible* to your audience. It is there to
> help the reader, not hinder the writer.

While your last statement is certainly correct, the comparison of
printed to electronically published material isn't, IMO. Take two
simple examples: most style guides agree that 60-70 characters per
line ensure optimum readability. How will you cater to that if you
don't know if the visitor is running a 10pt font at 1600x1200?
Or: you've got a scientific text that is, say, 150 written pages
long. With a book, it's pretty easy to ensure that readers find
their way through this information by means of TOC, index, running
headers and footers, formatting etc. But for e-text?  Splitting
along eg the H4 will make navigation extremely cumbersome while
splitting along H1 will leave the reader with *long* screens. Now
what?

> I have written style guides for both paper and on-line publishing. The
> same rules cannot apply 100% to both media: your style guide must be
> tailored to what you are doing. But there are certain basic concepts
> that are universal to the written word in any medium, any style of
> writing, and any language.

Yes, but... this has little to do with the CMS and its prescriptive
approach.

> 95% of the web is illiterate. There is just no excuse for this. The
> problem with "anyone can be a publisher" is that there are too few
> copy editors to go round.

Same for paper, if you ask me. Compare a standard LaTeX document
to a standard Word document - it's absolutely unbearable. And: the
easy availability of "programs" like Word (which will let you rape
innocent texts repeatedly without your running danger of being
arrested) has actually changed people's perception of correct
typography. Kerning?  Optical margin adjustment? What for? Now
we've got hyphenation wizard98, and our documents look like fuvg,
but we don't care because our sheep-like instinct to conform makes
us believe it looks "good" or even "KeWL". Not.

[...]
> What can I rant about next?

How to ensure optimum readability with HTML. I'm still interested in
that.

Robin

-- 
The One and Only Robin S. Socha 
<http://www.kens.com/robin/>
Cc: me and I'll kill -9 you

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