Agitprop
Note: this is a ghost site, not being maintained. It reflects some of my Web activity between 1996 and 1999. I keep it up for Historical Interest the convenience of those who continue to cite it, though I no longer uphold many of the technical opinions expressed here, and other things are broken.
Letters are things, not pictures of things.
Eric Gill
Agitprop is an experimental space at Metrius (formerly Verso), featuring items of interest to Web developers, particularly with regard to typographical design support. Comments to Todd Fahrner.
- All about text styling on the Web
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- Toward a standard font size interval system
- Discusses how the 7 HTML font sizes should (and don't) relate to the 7 CSS font size keywords. This isn't really finished, but that hasn't stopped me from publicizing in other fora. Features pretty tables, or so I'm told. More academic than my "Beyond the FONT tag" article, below.
- Beyond the FONT tag: Practical HTML text styling
- Unlike the usual utopic stuff on Agitprop, this one's got production-grade advice. Less academic than my "Toward a standard font size interval system" article, above.
- Why Points Suck
- A thousand-word GIF essay and a dump of ill-edited correspondence on units of measure for Web design.
- The Amazing Em Unit
- A trivial demonstration of the value of CSS's em unit, as well as HTML 4.0's
OBJECT element. Requires a modern browser to see the point. View source to see what's happening.
- The Box Acid Test
- A "tough but fair" composite test of the CSS-1 box model as applied to HTML 4. At this writing, no released browser passes it.
- Notes toward an optimal CSS UI
- Proposes, discusses a user-interface feature set for CSS browsers. And other things.
- The Core Style Project
- A W3C Style Activity developed by Verso, the project proposes a modular architecture for Web stylesheets, providing style authors with high-quality models and bases for their own elaboration. See the Development Interface.
- The Base Stylesheet
- Developed for the W3C CSS-2 Specification as an informative reference, this is a CSS1 model of the "consensus default" stylesheet for all HTML 4.0 elements in Mosaic-derivative Web browsers (Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer).
- An intranet?
- A "stunt" mock-up of an intranet using strict nonpresentational HTML and CSS1. Stylesheet is randomized: reload to see variants.
- Dithering: Good, Bad, and Ugly
- Worth a look if you process images for the Web. Free Photoshop plug-ins and scripts for DeBabelizer.
- Font-adjust: A CSS-enhancement proposal
- Original proposal for a means to enable "font-independent typography" for the Web. Now part of CSS-2, with a few improvements.
- How to
- ...set up a personal stylesheet UI in Internet Explorer 4.01 (or later) for Macintosh
- Some problems with CSS implementations
- An early look at what has since become a huge problem. Documentation and (out of date?) workaround suggestions for a sad, sad story.
