Marcello wrote:
Joshua Hutchinson wrote:
1 - First thing that jumps out is the need for bigger left and right margins. This is a simple CSS change. Currently, DP has *mostly* standardized on 10% margins on the left and right. This gives some nice white space for easier reading and gives room for things like original source page numbers and sidenotes to be put in the margin area.
... I think, the CSS provided is just an example. Everybody here has enough skills to build a CSS he/she likes. For the end user we may consider an "alternate stylesheet" model where she may switch between a set of predefined ones.
The beauty of transforming "standardized" TEI documents into XHTML [see note at end] is that, when done right (with no presentational markup), the XHTML for all the documents will itself be uniform and standardized, thus amenable to swappable CSS style sheets which can be applied to almost the whole collection, if not all of it. Of course, the documents will also be reasonably accessible since accessibility is enhanced by this approach. A favorite site of mine which demonstrates the power of swappable CSS is "CSS Zen Garden", http://www.csszengarden.com/ , which essentially uses the same, high quality (and accessible) document, and invites anyone to submit their own CSS style sheet -- hundreds of style sheets have been submitted so far from many web designers/artists/enthusiasts. It's amazing to see the variation of complex styling which can be applied to such a simple document (try viewing the base document without CSS -- images are separate from the document and also swappable in CSS Zen Garden.) Certainly, how PG would enable style sheet swapping may be different than how CSS Zen Garden does it, but that's beside the point. The important point is that it can be done, and will be an exciting addition to PG by allowing readers to "have it their way" rather than "having it our way." We will not have to argue on whether we want 10% or 20% margins, etc. This will also entice many to submit their own CSS designs for people to use. But it all starts with the Master markup being done *right*. Jon Noring [Note referenced above: This indicates that there should be NO presentational markup in the source TEI-conforming documents -- to take a pure structural/semantic approach to markup. About XHTML, the documents spit out from XSLT should be XHTML 1.1, or at least the content markup itself between <body>...</body> be valid to XHTML 1.1. I suppose we could also offer a "legacy", pre-styled, non-CSS HTML for those running really old and crusty, non-CSS browsers.]