RE: Alpha release feedback, please

by "Michael Gerholdt" <gerholdt(at)ait.fredonia.edu>

 Date:  Sun, 4 Oct 1998 10:14:04 -0400
 To:  "Ben Z. Tels" <optimusb(at)stack.nl>,
<hwg-critique(at)hwg.org>
 In-Reply-To:  bzt
  todo: View Thread, Original
Ben wrote:

>Could someone hop over to
>http://www.stack.nl/~optimusb/courses/html4.0/welcome.html to take a look?


Ben,

In NN 4.06 -

The background is white. I find the readability slightly difficult with the
font and spacing used - it's vertically oriented and horizontally cramped. A
little more space between lines would help.

Regarding the index, it is a bit strange to have to go way over to the right
of the screen and locate a one-character link. A very small target. There's
no need for pagination - just make the index topics links. Hypertext,
remember? ;)

Rather curious re: use of Header elements - H1 being a serif font of smaller
display size than the san-serif body text, and H4 being exactly the same as
the rest of the body.

This occurs in the welcome page:  One of these will
    always take you to the master index. One of them will always take you
    to the master index.

And at the end of the first page "What is HTML" there are two links to the
master index. Leaves me a little baffled.

I'd suggest "NEXT" and "PREVIOUS" and "MASTER INDEX" would be more intuitive
for a user than the more descriptive method you've chosen to provide
navigation to the 'next' topic.

These, however, aren't the issues you were really interested in hearing
about. It was readable in NN 4.06 but as I said, not really comfortable
reading the body. In Netscape 3.01 I found it to be easier reading without
the style sheet control. The text is not as cramped and the headers provide
better distinction between sections.

In the section on 'defining a doc' you are probably aware that Netscape 4.06
has text-oriented backgrounding in a paragraph rather than block-level
backgrounding. There is a way around this if you are interested which makes
it display more like IE. I believe that it is simply a matter of creating a
left-hand border. If you don't want the border to display, just make it one
px thick and the same color as the page background, and it will not be seen,
but then Netscpape will block out the paragraph instead of just putting the
background color behind the text. (I *think* this is how I jimmied it; if it
doesn't work, let me know, and I'll go back and look again.)

I look forward to using your site as a resource. I know that some of my
comments are probably personal-taste issues so please take them as that.

Hope this is of help,

Michael Gerholdt

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