Over the past few months, I've invented some interesting ways of displaying data to a computer user - mostly mechanisms for adding multiple dimensions to graphs.
This past weekend, I read Tufte's trilogy, and threw all those ideas away.
Instead, I'm looking at the way my user agent displays web pages. One of the things that I noticed is that my priorities are completely backwards.
Headings, H1 H2 and so on, are not content - they are structure. Like the lines on a sheet of graph paper, they should be relegated to the background.
Think of a contour map. One color, in different shades. Grey is the easiest, so that's where I've started. Very light grey background (CCCCCC), with darker structure elements (808080). I'd rather be using earth tones - the earth/sea maps in Tufte were visually persuasive.
Also, I came away with the notion that using colors that H. sapiens has been using for survival the last mumble thousand years are probably a good choice.
It slowed me down somewhat that I misread the cascading rules. So I lost motivation, thinking that J Random Webhack was going to be able to insist on his colors. But that's taken care of by making my rules !important. Fair enough.
Then comes the question of whether IE correctly implements the standard in question.
March 3, 2003 9:47 AM
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