Jan Roland Eriksson
jrexon@newsguy.com
This page is an attempt to illustrate several things that point to why it's not possible to directly transfer printed information over to a web page and still keep the original layout.
As the base for this discussion I have chosen an original text layout that in some variations has managed to stay on into printed text of our time. (the layout)
All those books were presenting Catholic views of the Christian religion and as Sweden was now all in all (forcefully) converted into the Lutheran confession, all those books were considered to contain forbidden texts.
Most of the books were hand written on parchment, a very strong material, that could well serve a few other purposes too.
The layout is a copy of a hand written page from Liber Sextus, the sixth Book of Laws of the Catholic Church.
The parchment pages were now ripped out of the bound books to be used as file folders for documents in the kings archive.
The original book that carries this layout was produced late in the 14th century for the library at the Vadstena Monastery in Sweden. This monastery was founded in 1384 and closed down in 1595 during the reign of King Sigismund (king of Sweden 1592-99).
Vadstena Monastery was well known for its large library of hand written books and they were now all confiscated by the state.
This was a disaster of course, but as it happens it did serve some purpose in the end. The king's archive is still available today, so it has been possible to start a recovery project with the target of restoring of as much as possible of that original book treasure.
This project has been underway for some years now and the page used as an example here is one of those that has been recovered.
The basic layout of this page is that it has two columns of text flowing down to the left and right of another two column area that covers the center of the page. That center part of the page carries the actual Text of the Law while the main columns carries commentary text.
It has been my intention to use CSS to try to make this www page use the same type of layout. This may not be available to everyone though. Client support for CSS still leaves a lot to be desired but at least Opera users should have a possibility to get the idea of this page.
It's interesting to find that, over time, the basics of this layout have been kept all the way into printed text of today.
So what is so terribly wrong with this web page then? (as if you have not already seen the effect of that)
The format has been simplified over time so what can be found today, most often on the cultural pages of newspapers, is a multi column design where two of the columns are flowing down the left and right sides of an embedded single column of other text.
But still the same connection to semantics is to be found there, i.e. the surrounding flow of text being the commentary part while the centered part still carries the keywords of the document.
Well, first of all it's not suitable to use a continuous presentation type of media like a web browser for a columnar layout of free text.
Rendering of text in columns has to rely on the fact that the space available for rendering is known. That is not the case for a web author targeting a web browser, where the view port can be set to just about any size within the users available VDU space. That fact, and others concerning this web page, leads to listed caveats on the following page.
The bottom line is that even a fully valid document, that carries a valid stylesheet suggestion, can be designed to totally abuse the intentions behind the technologies.
As it happens, this page validates to a stricter DTD than the current HTML Strict DTD, and has a totally flawless syntactical design in its stylesheet too. The basic bad in this page design came out of the head of the author, which is basically the same of any bad www design out there today.
Never the less, this page does not crash any browser that I know of, Opera likes it best and in addition it sure gives some interesting renderings in the others.
I used Opera 3.6x set to 11pt default font size, and MS-Georgia installed on the system to aid the major font suggestion in the stylesheet.