Sunday, January 15, 2012

Make the legal HTML Documents (such as the MPL) to look well

Some months ago, I bought "Typography for lawyers" (TFL), an excellent book that I recommend to all lawyers. And since the document larger, that I worked at the Miss, of course, published in HTML, I began a few minutes here and learning spending there enough CSS to make the license look better. (Of course, very pragmatic advice of the book focuses on Word and Pages, no HTML.)
Fine PrintFine Print by CJ Sorg, used under CC - BY 2.0
I published the experience (to compare with the MPL of HTML 1.1 address plain-jane). It is just an experience and a personal hack, but I am pleased to hear more suggestions and improvements, and if the end result work, I suggest that we use it instead of the traditional simple HTML version. Some notes on the process, including links to the articles of the (abbreviated) blog on the Web TFL site (much more thought and detail, buy the book):
Fonts: It was hard. The author of typography for lawyers himself is a designer of the former police and (correctly, I think) a snob of the police. As I was not doing the webfonts fantasy fair investment for this project, I have spent much time of navigation and play with Google's Web fonts. This is clearly not ideal (for example, there was only one choice for exhibitions monospace and B, and I would like a slightly more subtle wheelbase for the titles), but I think I found a decent combination of fonts - or at least an improvement on the system fonts. Likely, if this became official, some choice of better fonts could be used.Small caps: I had never given small caps much thought until reading TFL. The book is quite positive on them in certain circumstances, and that led me to experiment and, possibly, use them as headers. Unfortunately, the fonts Web of Google is limited here - none of the Google Web fonts seems to have real small caps. TFL strongly recommends against false smallcaps, but I think that these decent look therefore I used I would be happy to replace with a better if it was available.Hyphenation and Justification:TFL does not necessarily recommend full justification, but requires the hyphenation if you fully justified. Since Mozilla has simply added support for hyphenation, I turned on the hyphenation and justification, and I think it looks good (if you use a recent version.) Production, it would be probably better use something like hyphenator that works cross-browser, or use a sort of browser feature detection to disable the justification for the browsers that support also the hyphenation.The length of the line:TFL recommends something between 45 and 90 characters per line. (Documents well designed by the Supreme Court are about 65 characters per line). As best as this newbie CSS can be said, unfortunately, is no good way to do this simply in CSS. I finished with a total hack, using the "alphabet trick" described in TFL to estimate the width of the right.All in capital letters: TFL IS AGAINST ALL UPPERCASE FOR ALL PARAGRAPHS. My experimental uses of HTML version blocks some raw CSS to create a highlight box autour two traditionally for all-caps in the text."smart" quotes: we know that people copy and paste from HTML version of the licence text files, even if (with 2 MPL) we will provide a version very nicely to plain text of the licence. And of course, copy and paste text quotes gross empochent…4 messy. And I am therefore in conflict on this subject. The above linked HTML code uses smart quotes, while the plain text uses straight quotes. Inevitably, that will lead to some problems; suggestions on the best way to fix (use javascript to modify what's copy-and-pasted if someone wants?) are welcome.
Of course, I am always of very bad with CSS and HTML, so I am sure that this document can be improved, and I am happy to take suggestions and corrections. Regardless, it was an educational experience for me and I am happy that I played with him.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 22, 2011 at 07: 02 and is filed under law, licensing, mozilla, BGP, work. You can follow your comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment or a trackback from your own site.


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