Re: Critique needed for lessons

taliesin the storyteller skrev:
> * Herman Miller said on 2006-05-24 05:17:32 +0200
>
>>taliesin the storyteller wrote:
>>
>>>I've started making lessons for Taruven, there is one up so far at
>>>
>>>   http://taliesin.nvg.org/taruven/lessons/1.html
>>>
>>>Is it too much to learn at once? Too little? Too tricky? Too easy? Fun?
>>>Boring? Should it be possible to look up the answers somewhere?
>>
>>Looks pretty good as far as the contents. I don't especially care for
>>the look of the fixed-space font for the English glosses, but there
>>aren't many alternatives if you want to distinguish that from the bold
>>and italic text....
>
>
> There's underlining... but it's easy enough to change since all the
> fancy stuff is done in css.
I'd rather use underlining for the stuff you have marked red.
Since color markings do get lost when printing out(1) on a
B/W printer(2) I usually avoid marking anything (or at
least anything really important) with color.

As for the marking of English glosses I'd really prefer
the standard convention of 'single quotes', simply 'cos
to my eye at least the fixed width font doesn't stand
out enough(3) -- I'm aware you can't tweak that with css,
though.  (Durst I suggest you convert the whole thing
to PHP and use a function? ;)(4)  Otherwise the idea to
have a css class for glosses is a good one.

An answers lookup would definitely be a Good Thing,
exercises without answers being a Bad Thing -- since
essentially then you have to email the author pestering
them for the answers! :)

A link to a pronunciation guide would definitely also
be a Good Thing.  I looked around your site but found
no pronunciation guide -- not even an approximative one,
so I guess the pronunciation is tricky to describe?
I have my idea of course, which is probably wrong.
Kudos for using þorn.  I love þorn (since I love Old
Norse and Old English.


<OT notes>
(1) I not only find it extremely tiring to read long
passages of text onscreen, but I don't get the contents
either.  Besides I like lying down when reading, and
doing that onscreen is complicated even if you have a
laptop, which I don't.

(2) There are several good reasons not to have a color
printer, e.g.

     a. Color laser printers are darned expensive.

     b. Color inkjet printers get clogged and break
     all too easily, and then they print all text in
     green or magenta, which is Really Annoying!

     c. The color toner/ink is very expensive,
     and is used up all too fast.  (And even B/W
     toner is expensive and gets used up all too fast!)

     d. If you have both a color printer and kids,
     the latter will print out a lot of large colored
     pictures, which would make things even more expensive!
	
(3) I generally dislike monospace fonts where the 1 ('one')
and the l (lowercase L) look the same or too much the same,
and most monospace fonts are bad in this respect -- the
obvious but too seldom seen solution being not to have any
'foot' on the 'one'.  The same problem of course exists with
the uppercase o and the zero, but there being no obvious
solution.  My favorite solution is to have the zero as a
*backslashed* zero, so that it is sufficiently
differentiated booth from Norwegian Ø and from Greek Theta.

(4) My main reluctance to PHP-ize my own pages is that I
really prefer Perl, and wish Perl could be as easily incorporated
with HTML...  (Darn, my ISP doesn't support Perl at all any
more.  I *really* need to change ISP!)
</OT notes>

I really gotta get out of the habit of writing lots of notes
that are only marginally connected to the text.  I guess it
goes with my puttering creative process...

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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