Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

All praise to the text artisan

How can you not deeply admire someone who detests the <br /> tag? Particularly when you detest the <brazilian /> team.

I’ve been coding HTML documents since mid-1994 and obviously my expertise has grown significantly since then. But reading Dorothea Salo’s posts on Lists and Markup Theory and DIVs and SPANs made me aware of some huge gaps in my understanding. (As a client said to me the other day: “Jonathon, I’m not like you. I need to understand something thoroughly before I can use it or talk about it convincingly.”)

Although I’ve taught hundreds of people how to use a definition list, I’d never used one myself. Now I see that it’s perfect for a blogroll. I’d already thought of DIVs and SPANs as comparable to paragraph and character styles in Word, but I hadn’t considered the DIV visually, as a container one might need to put a border around. And though I never used multiple <br /> tags instead of <p> or <div> tags, Dorothea’s explanation that “it does not provide any information about the items before and after the line break” clarified the essential uselessness of the <br /> (except for line breaks in poems).

So I spent some time this weekend cleaning up my templates according to Dorothea’s prescriptions. (Since the day is looming when Mark Pilgrim will demand that I implement relative text sizing, I want the templates and style sheets to be as simple as possible.) I found I agreed with Dorothea that underlined links are just plain ugly—now they’re bolded.

And in doing so I gained a real appreciation of the text artisan:

The various sorts of text artisanry have their own sets of rules and practices, their own jargons, their own tools. One thing they have in common, I think, is people like me: people with an abiding love of and need for text who nevertheless have no particular need to be text artists. Not all text artisans are like this, admittedly, but so very many are.

And the very best text artisans are not only willing to share the secrets of their craft but are able to articulate that wisdom clearly and succinctly. Thank you, Dorothea Salo.

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