Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
II
An Example of Text Formatting
This topic uses many formatting elements that are the same as, or similar to, the core HTML set
mentioned here. In particular, we use a combination of bolding and bullets to present some ideas in
easy-to-identify chunks that draw your eye to topics of interest.
One difference between print and the Web is who decides how things look. For a topic like this one,
a topic designer and others will have thought long and hard about exactly how a bulleted list, for
instance, should look, and adjusted the layout down to the point—a printer's measurement that's
been standardized at 1/72nd of an inch.
On the Web, HTML only specifies what formatting to put in; each specific web browser has its own
rules for how the formatting looks. It seems to us that some initial decisions got made in a hurry for
the first browsers that were created, and then copied in other browsers over time for the sake of
backward compatibility. The result is not very pretty.
How do these elements look in a WordPress blog? Figure 4.4 shows one example, from the news
roundup, a regular feature in the gvDaily.com blog maintained by one of the authors (Smith).
Figure 4.4
Real blogs
use (simple)
formatting.
The blog's header comes from the WordPress theme, and is about the right size relative to the text.
(Some HTML headers are way too large relative to the normal text size.) To highlight different sto-
ries, the blog uses a formatted combination of text and links, both in bold. Although the links offer
the ability to click away, the formatting and content seek to give the reader the gist so as to keep
them onsite most of the time.
