Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> Why?  Because this kind of layout hurts readability more than it helps!

  Did you read my text about using and misusing? You are exaggerating, as
people always do in this kind of flamewars: When I say that you could use
a color to distinguish keywords from the rest of the text, you immediately
jump with exaggerations about "20+ colors". That tactic is old and cheap,
and convinces no-one.

  I disagree with you: When used well, fonts and colors are a great aid to
read text (the fact that this can be misused does not invalidate this fact).
  On the contrary: Text with no distinction about different types of
elements can be harder to read and understand (note that I didn't say
"is always"; don't start to exaggerate again, please).

> And do works of Shakespeare, Joyce or Orwell require more than a simple
> font, maybe a italics version of it and a bit indenting to outline very
> complex stories?

  No, because they don't need to. They are stories, not technical specs.
People don't read them to find something specific; they just read the
whole text from beginning to end, and everything is equally important
and thus doesn't need special emphasis.
  (And as you said: They do use layout, such as italics and indenting.)

>  Do papers by Einstein or Newton require fancy layout to
> express their ideas?

  Absolutely yes. Mathematical formulae have a clear layout in order to
be easy to read and understand and to clearly differentiate them from the
rest of the text. The layout of mathematical formulae is very fancy
(because you can't get it with eg. a typewriter).
  When you are looking for a certain formula in they papers, it's easy
because of the layout.

> So if some of the most brilliant people did not require advanced layout to
> make their ideas known on the planet

  But they did. Imagine that the formulae in Einstein's paper would have
been written in ascii in C style...

> why does a little web page need it for
> much less important information? -- Because the little content a web page
> has is so unimportant compared to their work, it has to be made appear more
> than it is!

  If layout makes the page more readable and makes finding things easier,
I see no reason to not to use it.
  Again, it's not about being fancy, it's about helping the reader.

  (It seems to me that you think that every time someone defines some
layout property in a web-page, the only and sole purpose for it is to
make the page fancier, not to help the reader to understand the text.
I couldn't disagree more.)

  I am completely read to make a test:
  I can make two versions of the Q&T pages, one as it's currently and
another with no CSS and all of your "layout" tags removed (ie. <i>, <b> etc).
Then we can make a poll about which version do people prefer.

  On the other hand, why bother? Why both know the answer already.
  But this would demonstrate one point: According to you it's best for
the readers to have the pages with no layout definitions. The votes would
certainly prove the contrary.
  (Well, let me guess: Most of the people are stupid, and only a very few
enlightened people know what is the best thing to have... ;) )

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

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