I’m inclined to be classical — or cantankerously old-fashioned, depending on your outlook — about this, perhaps because I remember the many sins of typography committed in the name of The New Medium that came during the early popularization of the Web. Sure, be bold; be new; be cool. Use sans-serifs if they’re what you like best. Just don’t take it yet as gospel that sans-serifs are the one true way, especially for long stretches of text.

One more comment on another matter: So-called educated quotes are not always a good idea. Windows operating systems designed for Chinese often choke on these and other typographical niceties. In many cases, curly quotes will not appear on Chinese Windows systems; a blank space or a Chinese character will appear instead, often swallowing the character following the quotation mark. You think Web pages are ugly with straight quotes? Try Web pages with lacunae and random Chinese characters!

This is most likely also the case with operating systems designed for Japanese and other languages whose writing systems are non-alphabetic (not “ideographic,” despite popular misconceptions and, alas, the misinformation spread by the Unicode Consortium and CSS specs).

As for “Steal these” buttons: Dave Shea is all about webDESIGN, whereas you (as far as I can tell) care much less about DESIGN and much more about WEB{,standards,markup,etc}. I say, as long as they’re tastefully picked and don’t clash with the feel of the site, there’s no harm in using them.

Oh, and definitely have a mail with Anne about UTF-8; he helped me convert my work’s CMS to UTF-8 entirely, and made it very easy for me to do so. :)

Well except for allowing XML based tools to more easily grab and parse your content. Sigh. I don’t mind you not using XHTML, but please don’t say there is no advantage to it.

No thoughts on the serif/sans-serif item? I, for one, find serif fonts more readable, even on screen; I admit, though, that I may be an aberration.

Eric, your links aren’t underlined for me – I set non-underlined-ness as the default. Never assume anything ever :)

That was kind of my point. As I said in the post:

I don’t assert link styles at all.

Thus, the link styles on meyerweb mirror what the reader expects, in the form of his browser preferences. I scored “yes” to all three questions because François’ preferences are set in such a way that this site yielded positive results for him on all three points. I thought I was clear about that, but perhaps not.

Well ok, now that you mention it, you do use some non-ASCII characters like � and �… But then again, if you start using UTF-8 you can go about using even more fancy characters! Yay! ^_^. Thing is, there are really only advantages to using UTF-8, except if you have existing content in a different character encoding.

About converting ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8… Load the document in particular as ISO-8859-1 in your favorite text editor supporting UTF-8 (Notepad, or rather, Notepad2!) and save them as UTF-8. Surely there are tools around to automate this as well.

~Grauw

O, and if you ever need some help with utf-8, just mail ;-)