Textism · 4 July 2001
Listeners prefer music played on tuned instruments. Diners prefer food not laced with ground glass. Readers tend to read more when handed well-formed text. And the foreseeable future of the web – lurid broadband fantasies of Steves Case and Ballmer notwithstanding – is text.
The fading propagandists of usability, as an adjunct to detesting beauty, have always hated text.
Users don’t read
Users only scan
Users haven’t got
No attention span
This may once have played in the boardroom, but the expanding oceans of online reading material can’t be ignored, though much of it looks like .
What’s troubling is that while certain technologies have had their contribution to web design , and while dubious have entire acolyte cultures, other standards, in place for years, have gone largely ignored.
My friend Jeffrey Zeldman is a great champion of thinking design. His work in bringing mud-stuck designers over the hump into compliant code and stylesheets has been remarkable. But Jeffrey still with the irksome, confusing typographic marks inherited from the ancient compromised technology of typewriters. Quoting text with "double" and 'single' prime marks at this stage in the evolution of online text is no better or worse than requiring a plugin or adhering to HTML 2.
Numeric entities that allow web text to approximate the complex simplicity of well-set ink on paper are standards-compliant, pan-platform, browser-safe. They also have real practical value to readers, which is important, even as designers keep indulging themselves with the concession, “it’s just text.”
A by-product of recent work on the Big Project (Untitled) is a handful of utilities intended to improve the typographic integrity, and predictable rendering, of text on the Web. One utility is designed to allow writers working in a certain ubiquitous word processing application to convert text – proper quotes, dashes and diacritics intact – to browser-friendly code, without thinking about it. I’d appreciate it if you’d try it out and let me know where it doesn’t work.
Textism Word to HTML converter
UPDATE: Some WinWord users were having problems, others weren’t. Everyone was having problems with question marks, which should now be fixed. Any further error reporting is most welcome.
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