Re: Should we make a www group?

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Bud Beckman wrote:

> >You don't really need to know what it is (-; CSS actually makes it
> >easier. Instead of needing <FONT> tags, you can just use <H1> , <H2>
> >,... , <EM> , <STRONG> , ... and the stylesheet does the markup. You
> >just need to link to the stylesheet in the header ( which you use the
> >template for ... )
> 
> I thought about using it, then when all were wondering if Linux browsers
> were going to be able to interpret it, I thought they would be unable to do
> so. Am I wrong? Anyway, I ended up thinking it more of a frill than useful
> for a plain old web site.

Firstly, for a "plain old website", *logical* markup tags are good. This
is because all browsers can handle them. For example, lynx knows what
<EM>, <STRONG>, and <H1> mean, but lynx doesn't know what "<FONT
FACE="Ms-comic-sans"> means. The bottom line ? if you want your html to
work nicely on all browsers, use logical markup tags.

However, one pitfall of the logical markup tags is that you can't define
things like font, etc. CSS takes care of this by letting you redefining
logical markup tags for CSS enabled browsers, without making your html
inaccesible to lynx, NS3, kfm and anything else that doesn't understand
CSS. Check out the indy website using kfm. It looks essentially the same,
just less fancy. IOW, gracefully degraded.

> After installing RH 5.2 I have been tring to get drivers for my video card
> using the new XFree86 RPMs, I'm busy making mistakes.

have fun with the mistakes (-; what video card do you have ? 

> If you want to use a special font, you can put it on the server and refer to
> it in HTML. Think I read that somewhere.

This is unnecessary. You can use a list of several fonts, and if you pick
the fonts carefully, you can be sure your visitor has at least one of
them.

-- Donovan