Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Using ragged right for blogs and full justification for print makes sense from the respective perspec-
tives, if you'll excuse the unintentional rhyme. A blog is displayed on a computer screen, and fully
justified text on a low-resolution screen tends to have gaps that are too large and clump into ugly
runs down through a block of text.
In print, where higher resolution is the norm and where the reader has often paid for the news-
paper or magazine in question, a high-quality appearance is achieved by using the more formal full
justification. (However, you can also see large gaps between words and runs of whitespace in
newspapers, which have narrow columns and relatively low resolution—the least friendly form of
print for full justification.)
The limited width of the page available in a WordPress blog, the limited length that your blog posts
should assume, and the wide variety of ways that web pages are read are all arguments for simplic-
ity. Content is king; formatting is secondary and supportive. It should never be the point.
However, to say that formatting is secondary and supportive is not to say that you shouldn't use it
at all. Many bloggers complain about the limited formatting options available to them on the Web in
general, and in WordPress in particular—and then underuse the ones that are indeed available and
handy. Try to use the formatting that is available to make your blog posts easier to scan, for readers
who are so inclined, and more interesting and rewarding when read carefully.
Why HTML Matters in Posts
We discuss Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) extensively in Chapter 8, but we also need to
briefly mention its role in WordPress.com-based sites here. This is so you understand the capabili-
ties as well as the limitations of WordPress.com better.
WordPress.com is one of the most powerful and effective sites around for creating and publishing
web pages. It achieves this power in part by limiting you to existing themes, which are adapted to
blog posts as the main content. The capabilities and limitations of HTML, the underlying language
of web pages, are very much in evidence within WordPress.
The reason you can easily do certain kinds of text formatting—headings, bolding, and bullets, for
example—is that these are the ones that are supported right in the core of HTML. The reason you
can't do many other kinds of formatting, and the reason you can't achieve precise positional con-
trol of text and graphics in your blog entries and blog pages, is because HTML doesn't support it.
By using core HTML, your blog entries can be viewed on a very wide range of devices, from cell
phones to screen readers for the blind. You can surpass these limitations using HTML code that
you add in yourself (see Chapter 9, “Adding Graphics to Your Posts”), WordPress software rather
than a WordPress.com blog, and more advanced formatting capabilities such as CSS (Cascading
Style Sheets), but your pages then won't be as easy to create, nor able to be viewed usefully on as
many devices, as WordPress.com blog pages.
The purpose of using the WordPress.com site is to allow you to concentrate on your blog's content
plus some rough formatting, and then let the finer points of formatting take care of themselves.
