Welcome to the October/November 2003 issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

Our goal is to present information that will be useful to you as a web site owner. If these newsletters are not useful to you, please forward this to a friend who will find it useful. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.

Somewhere near the middle of October our furnace gave up the ghost. Near the end of October we were asked to cover an aviation convention in Philadelphia. Given all that distraction, we decided that the better part of valor was to combine the October and November issues.

This Month's Topics
Code Sources
All About Fonts

Code Sources

A lot of the code that supports a website is fairly standard stuff and current authoring tools create it without a lot of hassle. But every once in a while we come across a problem that the standard code won't solve. Then it's time to search for sources.

Many people are surprised to learn that a lot of code is available free of charge on the web. Programmers frequently offer snippets of free code as a form of advertising -- embedded in the code are comment lines with the programmer's name and website, and the terms of use for the code require including those comment lines. The nice thing is that everybody benefits -- we get your website done faster, you get a better website for less money, and the programmer gets a little advertising.

Of course "free" and "good" are not necessarily synonymous and this is where your humble web developer earns his keep. Nothing requires the programmer to document his/her code adequately (or at all!), of course, so some reverse engineering may be necessary to figure out how the code works. And then there's the testing to make sure it works in the circumstance we plan to put it in. Sometimes it only works for certain browsers, or even certain versions of certain browsers. And occasionally we find one that doesn't work at all (not a good advertisement for the programmer's skills). More often than not , however, the code not only works, but works well.

Why not just write it from scratch? For very small things that works, but most of the time digging up free code is considerably faster. It's faster because (1) there are a lot of programmers out there offering code for the taking; and (2) the amazing capability of search engines today means it's not unusual to come up with 3-4 reasonable candidates on the first couple of searches.

Another option that often works well is cheap code. Instead of free code, some websites offer code for a nominal price (usually under $100). This code is frequently much more complete than free code, often including extensive documentation and multiple options.

Free or cheap, it makes our lives a little easier and gets you your website a little faster.

All About Fonts

There seems to be a lot of confusion about fonts as used on the web, so we thought we'd do our part to lessen the confusion.

Let's start by clarifying the distinction between font and typeface. Technically, "typeface" refers to a family of type with the same design -- Times Roman is a typeface, Arial is another typeface. "Font" refers to a specific instance of a typeface -- thus Times Roman 14-point bold is a font, and Times Roman 14-point italic is a different font. Now that you understand that you can forget it, since the words have come to be used interchangeably in the worlds of desktop and web publishing.

More pertinent to today's web is the distinction between graphic text and HTML text. Graphic text is a picture of text. It is created as a graphic, it is downloaded as a graphic, it cannot be edited easily, and search engines can't read it. But it will always look the same regardless of what browser or computer system you view it with.

HTML text is a whole different animal. It is downloaded as individual characters, with accompanying code describing its font. With HTML text, however, the font is applied in the browser using whatever fonts the browser can find in the user's computer. That's right -- you may have carefully specified Bookman Old Style or Century Gothic to get a particular effect, but if the user only has Times Roman on his or her computer, that's the font your text will appear in. Your browser is programmed to try to match a specified font with the closest match it can find in its computer, but if the choices are very limited (which is common for most computers not used for web design or desktop publishing), the match may not be very good.

Frustrating? You bet. Is there a fix? Well, yes, but it's not a good one. You can specify a font and link it to a font server. The problem is that the quality of your page now depends on how quickly two servers (your normal server and the font server) respond, and font servers are frequently sluggish responders.

What are the relative advantages of graphic text and HTML text? Graphic text has the advantage that it always looks the way you intended it to look. HTML text, on the other hand, downloads much faster, can be edited much more easily, is sharper in small point sizes, and can be changed by a style sheet.

What's a style sheet? That's next month's discussion -- it will require building a web page or two to demonstrate, but it will be fun and interesting.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110