Microsoft's forgotten monopoly

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Good grief

?As a screen and graphic designer and an eLearning specialist for over 20 years...?/i]

You may be a learning specialist, but you clueless about IT.

?...I can say: NO - you are wrong.?

Nothing like denial without a shred of evidence, eh?

Presumably your original materials were distributed on floppy - we?re talking 1986 here, right? So nearly any computer other than a Mac didn?t have a GUI and you either used the screen font or created your own GUI. Once Windows was more common, say early ?90s, then you had the standard TrueType fonts on nearly all computers. They were rip-offs of Postscript fonts and installed in Mac OS, Windows and OS 2. I guess you moved to CD distribution in the mid ?90s and then you could install your own fonts if you wanted to.

Once we got the web, you already had standard fonts on nearly all computers, by the late ?90s nearly all PCs were Windows boxes with about 10% Macs. So where was the ?font hell?? It never existed!

?When you need your screen to look exactly like you planned it (as distinct from near enough is good enough) you need standard fonts that will display the same on every computer.?

Firstly, CSS2 has allowed you to download fonts to the client PC since 1998, so you have no excuse for not using exactly the font you wanted to.

Secondly, even if you specify the font and size, you have no idea what size it will actually display on the screen, nor whether your users need it larger or smaller for their particular visual ability. There is no set correlation between physical screen size, resolution (aka ?dot pitch?) or display setting (e.g. 1024x768). I had a screen that said it was 43cm but was physically 40cm. It could display any resolution from 400x600 through to 1280x1024. How on earth could you make any font or even image look ?exactly like you planned it?? You couldn?t!

?trying to suggest this isn't just a standard anti MS beat up to get exactly these kinds of posts is sadly disingenuous.?

As "eLearning specialist" perhaps you should learn a bit about comprehension. I?ll quote from my post, had you done so you?d realise you?ve utterly missed the point. In response to the statement:
"Why is Microsoft a problem here? "
I said:

?They aren't. I didn't say they were, nor did Hakon.

Did you get it this time? Let me say it again: Microsoft aren?t the problem, that was just a hook to get you to read the article. Now, say it out loud so it sticks, at least in short-term memory.

Posted by: Fred Fredrickson   Posted on: 06/26/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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