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RE: Font size

for

From: John Foliot - bytown internet
Date: May 30, 2002 2:50PM

<snip>
> It is not the designers you need to convince but the companies and clients
> to whom hire the designers.

<snip>
> It harks back to the philosophies of
> print design, and the designer's desire to control the user's
> experience.

My mandate du jour is to try and eradicate the expression "publish your
web". This phrase runs rampant within the Canadian Federal Government (to
whom I do some consulting work for).

For one, a "web" is not, in and of itself, really a thing, except of course
at Microsoft. But even more important is the terminology of "publish".
Publish invokes thoughts of type setting, Pantone colours, 5 colour prints,
offset printing, and all of that great "stuff" of the publishing world. But
publishing is but one form of communication. Movies are produced, so too
are television and radio programs. Billboards are erected, music is both
recorded and published. And web sites (or web pages if you must) are
posted. Posted to a server where they are then retrieved (GET) by a web
browser. There is no publishing involved.

Now of course, it's a semantics game, but it underscores a fundamental point
and it also allows us, the converted, to expand upon the point that web
development IS NOT publishing, and that the rules and constraints between
print (fixed page sizes for example, or Pantone colours) and web development
are different, and must be treated as so. I reason that if we can stop them
thinking that it's publishing, we are on the way to making them understand
many of the issues we confront every day.

So I ask you all to take up the cause... eradicate the word publish from any
discussion of web site development. Make a conscious effort to avoid the
term, correct others when they use it, and maybe, just maybe, we'll get
through.

JF




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