Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
Ummm.... minor nit. The golden mean (or golden ratio or golden section or 1.618) predates electronics. It was more of an art than science but the basic idea was there. Check Greek architecture for example.
Now if I could figure out how this applies to making an image a hyperlink...
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No, not a nit, perhaps a misunderstanding. Nothing to do with as to when the understanding of when the golden ratio came about, but when the "60-66" characters per line came about.
I was referring to the earlier references by others to ease of reading, 60-66 characters in a line and to a "golden number" for line length, not to the "golden ratio" in art and architecture, photography composition, etc. which as far as know was recognized by the Greeks and maybe others earlier (so much earlier than electronics
, as you say).
In typography the relationship between font height, line height and line length can also be described in terms of the golden ratio of 1.618, but I have never heard it called the "golden number" as another called it. But it has nothing to do with 60-66 characters because line length, if the rule is applied, is completely dependent on font and line height. For myself, I have seen many basic ideas of lengths mentioned for best reading ease, but those mostly in the low 70s characters and don't need to match the 1.618 rule.
As I described the 60-66 characters in a line sometimes referred to came about from the limitation of the carriage width of mechanical teleprinter machines. I don't know what the early requirements were (they go back to the mid 19th Century or so) but from, I suspect, the 1920's when modern (for the mechanical age) machines appeared the standard requirement was that a CR/LF was to be sent from the transmitting machine earlier than the 69th character in order to prevent carriage overrun.
If I remember correctly, it is sometime ago now
, it was common to send the CR/LF instead of the first space after 59 characters and this resulted in most lines not overrunning the carriage width of the receiving machine. This works on the basis of the average length of English and romance language words being approximately 5 characters and German approximately 6 characters, together with the majority of English and romance language words being less than, if I recall correctly 6 characters (I don't know about German). So it is easy to see that this resulted in line lengths typically 60-66 characters long.
I don't know what the actual carriage width of the old mechanical machines was, but it was greater than 69 of course if there was no overrun given the standard I described. With displays and line wrap now it doesn't matter but there are still teletype type fixed services that may use printers of fixed width as they transmit standard format messages to receiving printers - SITOR and Naxtex, for example, in the marine service (they are 100 baud and both reflow).
Most teletype type services now use far more complex transmission protocols than the old 2 tone 45.45 and 50 baud teletype service and are full error correcting plus use things such as mixed AM and FM modulation, many tones, spread spectrum, etc. and may even swap live between these things in order to maintain circuit reliability through talking with the receiving machine. One protocol I use the start and end of each block sent is a short multitone warble but the rest of the data in the block sounds just like white noise and often cannot be differentiated by ear from normal band noise in MF and HF radio circuits.
Radioteletype of the old 2 tone type is, of course, pretty much not used now but 2 of applications I have will still do radio teletype if wanted (as an option to using their more sophisticated error correcting, etc., modems) and their default line maximum length is 74 characters, and I wonder if that is the same as the old mechanical machine carriage length? However, in contrast, most modern client applications I have or have seen reflow on displays.
And as you say, how all that relates to making an image a hyperlink I do not know
. Perhaps it has been done to death? And my joining the random walk from it will be no more than "horse manure" (aka "horseshit") to some
. But I hope the above infers knowledge rather than the ignorance that terminology is accusative of
.