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Authoring and Design for the WWW

PRINCIPLES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

Functional markup versus fixed formatting

Disadvantages of functional description

Some of the strongest opponents of the functional description approach are designers. Some of their objections are made with good reason, others not. These points are particularly relevant to Adobe Acrobat, discussed in Appendix Three, a solution based on fixed formatting, and therefore strongly contrasted to the principles of functional description.

Perceived disadvantages include: lack of control over layout and over typography; poor integration of various media; lack of resemblance to paper documents; and a lack of visual quality'.

Lack of control over layout

Document designers use layout not just to make a decorative page but to lead the eye of the reader usefully from one part of the information to another. HTML is accused of providing insufficient control for the designer in dictating exactly where elements of the page will appear.

In practice

Even within the limited design which straightforward HTML text provides, there is considerable scope for the user to identify which items are most important and understand how they are intended to find routes through the text.

Even within straightforward textual Web pages, the use of different sizes of type, indents and bullets (all automatically applied by the browser on the basis of the HTML markup) can assist users in identifying the structure of the document the way in which the author intends them to read it.

It is true that the original HTML Version 1.0 had little to offer beyond a single column of text interrupted by pictures. Later versions have provided greater facilities for, for example, multi-column layout and the placing of images. However, the use of tables which has become popular as a way of getting greater control over the placing of text removes some of the advantages of portability, since tables are designed to impede the ability of the text to reflow to fit the window available.

Lack of control over typography

Currently there is nothing which fully overcomes the problem of users not having the fonts that the publisher would like them to have (publishers cannot give away fonts because they are commercial property). Adobe, with their overriding emphasis on the appearance of documents, have gone the furthest by providing variable fonts from which something approximating the missing fonts can be reconstituted at need: it will have the same spacing, line-length and broad characteristics as the original. Even this is only a step towards what designers would like: the ability (which they have in designing paper documents) to choose from hundreds of different fonts, knowing that this will give a particular character to the publication and that what they design will be what the user sees.

In practice

Sadly, with current HTML, users will end up seeing almost every document in one or at the most two fonts. This makes it difficult for an individual document or an institution to establish a voice' using a distinctive font. A work-around increasingly widely adopted is to use pixel graphics for headlines in distinctive fonts. See also Web style sheets, under The Future, p54.

In this frame from a Web page, the top decorated title is a pixel graphic sent as a GIF file, while the subheads are normal

HTML headings.

The disadvantages of this solution are that the user with a text-only browser will not see graphical headings; they cannot be searched for as text (they are just pictures of text, not the real thing); and those with poor vision will not be able to have such false text spoken using a text-to-speech converter, as they could if it were real text.

Poor integration of various media

Outside the limits of the Web, steps have been made recently in fully integrating all of the components of multimedia into a seamless surface, using authoring tools such as MacroMedia Director. This is currently difficult to achieve on the Web, partly because of the inherited textual bias of HTML. example Director document

In this non-Web multimedia document a close integration of text and graphics is possible using Macromedia Director, avoiding the limitations imposed by HTML.

In practice

Though many more media types are becoming available to some Web users through the use of plug-ins' for browsers like Netscape, it is still difficult to produce complete media integration. Instead the user sees a patchwork of rectangles each supporting different activities. Ironically, the only way currently to achieve the sort of integration of media shown in the illustration is to make modules in Director and then deliver them as Shockwave items over the Web, but the demands on computer speed and memory of large documents of this kind are currently prohibitive.

Contents

Graphics Multimedia Virtual Environments Visualisation Contents