No, you can’t set type in world-wide web pages, and until we can specify type faces and take complete command of size, leading, tracking, kerning, justification, hyphenation, and all the other factors that go into serious publishing, those of us who care about type and typography aren’t going to be able to take the medium entirely seriously. The only way to indent the first line of a paragraph of body copy, for example, is to add non-breaking spaces. Flowing text around images is largely a waste of time, since one viewer’s screen face is Times Roman at 12 points, another’s is Helvetica bold Italic at 18 points, and yet another’s, Hobo at 14 points. Good luck trying to drop an initial capital! Shall I mention the extensive, predictable color palette? Small capitals? Old-style figures? Multiple master faces? F ligatures? Ornaments? Base line shifting? Setting text on curves?
All is not completely lost.
Rather than burdening pages with typewriter-style punctuation, it’s possible to use a modicum of professional punctuation. Robin Williams wrote a small article in the November, 1997 issue of Adobe’s Image Club catalogue. Her suggested code substitutions are as follows:
Punctuation Example Code Function Opening single quote ‘ ‘ Opens a quote within a quote Closing single quote and apostrophe ’ ’ Closes a quote within a quote and indicates a contraction, but never a plural Opening double quote “ “ Opens a quote Closing double quote ” ” Closes a quote; all other punctuation belongs inside parentheses and quotes En dash – – Indicates duration of an interval, as in 10:00–10:30 Em dash — — Indicates a break or disruption Copyright symbol © © Indicates ownership of a name, contents, company logotype, et cetera Trademark symbol ™ ™ Indicates a name’s or phrase’s ownership Registration mark ® ® Indicates a trademark is registered Cent symbol ¢ ¢ Indicates a penny or pennies
I use a QuicKeys macro in my word processor to execute a series of searches and replacements, then copy and copy and paste the unintelligible code-cluttered text into my primitive HTML editor. The very first word processor I used on a pre-DOS computer in 1982 was more sophisticated.
If you’re familiar with an HTML page composition program that supports even this much typography, please send me an E-mail message.