Re: Ampersand ho!

On 3/9/06, Jean-François Colson <fa597525@...> wrote:
> > According to my handy-dandy CSS decoder ring,
>
> What's this?
CSS - Cascading Style Sheets - is the mechanism used by modern web
pages to specify stylistic (as opposed to structural) attributes: font
face, positioning of elements, etc.

The term "decoder ring" is a metaphor in this case.  The original item
dates back to days of yore when fans of  radio dramas could send in a
sufficient quantity of proofs of purchase of whatever product
sponsored the show to get, in return, a small ring (not the kind that
you wear on your finger; the decoding mechanism is just circular) that
would let them decipher secret messages tacked onto the end of said
show.  The messages were a series of numbers or letters, encoded in a
simple variant of a Caesar cipher, which the ring would let you
decrypt if you set it properly.  As portrayed in the wonderful movie
"A Christmas Story", the actual messages tended to be underwhelming
when compared to the effort required to obtain the rings - usually
more advertising. :)

I use the Firefox web browser; one of the reasons I use it is the
large number of third-party add-ons ("extensions") available for it.
One of the extensions I have installed is called "Web Developer",
which has all sorts of features that are useful to people who design
and build their own web pages - including tools for peeking under the
covers at how other folks' web pages work.   I used that tool to
quickly identify the font in question.  I selected Tools->Web
Developer->CSS->View Style Information (although I actually just hit
the shortcut, shift-command-Y), which turned my mouse pointer into a
crosshair, which I used to select the text containing the ampersand.
This made a window pop up with this list of style information
associated with the selected text:

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/styles.css

.blogtext p    (line 358)
{
    color: rgb(51, 51, 51);
    font-family: "Trebuchet MS";
    font-size: 13px;
    padding-top: 0px;
    padding-right-value: 0px;
    padding-bottom: 4px;
    padding-left-value: 0px;
    padding-left-ltr-source: physical;
    padding-left-rtl-source: physical;
    padding-right-ltr-source: physical;
    padding-right-rtl-source: physical;
}

> What do you think of Trebuchet MS' dollar sign?
Not a fan - the "horns" on the top and bottom of the S are too subtle.
 I prefer the variety with one or two lines all the way across the
figure.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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