WEB AUTHORING. MAT 108

Alejandra Jarabo
Multimedia Arts & Technologies
TEXT FOR THE WEB to Web typography
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There are 2 distinct ways of publishing text over the Web:
With ASCII text,
created by CODING HTML
(formatted with CSS)
With PICTURES of text,
in the form of web-graphics
(gif, jpeg, swf-flash)

Here is some text in html code
(default font)

Here some text in html code
(Verdana,Arial...sans serif)

Here some text in html code
(Verdana,Arial...sans serif)(small)

Here some text in html code
(Verdana,Arial...sans serif)(Xsmall)
PROS and CONS for html text
PROS and CONS for text in a bitmap (image) format

You have limited control of how the text looks
on the client's window
_the text is shown with the fonts available in their system_
_They can change the presets of how text looks on their side(accessibilty)

With CSS you can choose between a family of fonts
and determine the size of the text
(absolute size:18 pixels. relative size: xxsmall)


  


You have perfect control over the look of the text

You can use whatever font you want

you can use whatever visual treatment you want.

The user has to live with it and graphic designmers seldomly think about accessibility.

The text is searchable
by search-engines that use "robots" that only can read ASCII text
 


Not searchable. Sometimes you only want human eyes to see the content: the actual email adress, a telephone number.
The name of the file is actually rearchable for search engines: "hand.gif"


Text can get translated to other languages
can be copy/pasted

  
The image is what it is. No change is possible .
This complicates the task of updating content