OT: HTML/CSS design, LaTeX, Conlang Journal, etc.

On Sunday 14 April 2002 11:16, Shreyas Sampat wrote:
> On the subject of stylesheets, does anyone know a good source for
> learning CSS?  I'm under the impression that there are ways to
> provide multiple stylesheets and a way for the user to choose
> between them, and the like, which could be useful to me.  (I'm
> trying to arrange it so that I don't need to have different pages
> for formatting-intense and formatting-light webpages, since there
> are a good portion of Conlang members who prefer plainer-text
> browsers, and putting up two identical websites would be mildly
> ridiculous.)
OK. Here's my two cents on design. Please note that this is a
personal opinion, and though I am rabidly attached to it, I am mostly
okay with people ignoring it, too.

Sylvia's 1st Rule of Design: Design for black & white. Do not add
formatting, color, or any of the other fun stuff until you're
satisfied that the information you are presenting is laid out in a
way that helps understanding.

Sylvia's 2nd Rule of Design: After you're done with the first rule,
then you can add the fun stuff, being careful to always add to the
legibility and layout of the page and not to detract from it. When in
doubt, don't do it. White space is your friend.

Sylvia's Special Rule on HTML/CSS: O'Reilly is your friend.
Validators are useful. Lynx is indispensible.

My most often used HTML reference is the O'Reilly HTML: The
Definitive Guide. My only real CSS reference is O'Reilly's Cascading
Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide. Validators I use are:
http://validator.w3.org/ for HTML,
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ for CSS, and
http://www.cast.org/bobby/ for general over-all accessibility. As to
Lynx, see http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html if you don't
actually have a copy of it.

I generally design my pages (occasionally even professionally) with
as strict html as I can manage and I leave all the color and
formatting to the css file.

I've used LaTeX and I've toyed with the idea of composing my
reference grammar in it. It's big advantage is then I can use macrons
instead of accents for the Kélen vowels. However, it only exists on
my big desktop machine and not on my (or rather my employer's)
laptop, and since I like to do my composing in the backyard or by the
pool, I generally stick with Word, and save things as plain text.

As to the Conlang Journal, a site that made things available in PDF,
thus preserving all the formatting and special characters that
HTML/CSS is not capable of, would be wonderful. I would be happy to
volunteer my HTML and CSS skills, and I'll even try to dust off my
LaTeX knowledge if it'll be useful.

And Sheryas, as to choosing CSS files, that depends very much on the
browser a person is using. And then it is generally limited to
applying a local css file rather than the site css file. I would
suggest you just go for formatting-light where possible. As long as
whatever you put up degrades gracefully, no one should complain.

Off to the pool,
-Sylvia

--
Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com

The Kélen language can be found at:
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html

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