Hi Caesar, TP et al (if any et al's are still watching this one!)
I haven't the wherewithal these days to follow up the perception issues behind the serif issue, it's all probably written up in impossible scientific language in some obscure tome called, 'Journal of applied neuronal response' or some such.
I suspect you're absolutely correct about the importace of low res. on monitors, Caesar, but I feel that the same principle applies, namely that an awful lot of perception is going on under the surface. Basically what we 'perceive' is the end result of a great deal of processing, which is enhanced by the use of 'schema's', that is to say, for example, short cuts are applied to on-line processing to make it quicker, so that as the eye follows a line of written text the mind (a small word for a big idea!) is actually racing ahead based on the closeness of fit of certain 'rules' eg. if theres a 'cross' in a letter it must be a 't', or, if there's a 'apex' it must be a capital 'A'. These perception schema's (aka guesswork!) interact with other factors such as cognitive schema's, in this case, if there's a capital then that's a new sentence, so let's bundle the information from sentence '1', send it to the next department to analyses what it actually is 'saying' and get on with processing the next job, i.e. sentence '2'.
This very mechanistic interpretation has the great advantage that it's relatively easy to demonstrate in the lab and thus claim it to have some validity! It also goes to explain what most people have known all along via their common sense, a noble virtue that many psychologists could do with more of (parse that sentence TP!), and also means that research psychologists get to mess around with fabulously expensive computers which saves them from having to face up to the wicked world of real work!
A good example of this is evident in this post: text correctors, like Lucy, have to 'train' their perception not to process the writing normally but to interrupt the process (quite a difficult thing to do) - hence I didn't 'see' all my typo's as I 'perceived' the whole meaning - an effect heightened by the fact that as I wrote the stuff I knew what was going to be said anyway (authors will always need text correctors for this very reason!)
Back to the serifs
, we can see clearly that the serifs form a broken line which keeps the eye on the right track; at the perception, i.e. subconscious, level, but if the resolution is high enough the same perceptive process can infer a line with much less input, i.e. if the tops of the letters are 'square' enough the perception mechanism will 'infer' a unbroken line without the need for serifs.
In the context of perception much of this is called Gestalt Psychology (see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology) which will make Mrs Technopat cringe
This would indicate that the serifs would help reading off computer monitors, but I have a suspicion that the difference here is in the image input from the screen itself, which isn't fixed, although we perceive it that way, but is in fact oscillating (I'm skating on very thin ice here as I don't understand cathode ray tubes let alone flat screen technology). I think the serif issue is superceded in importance by the poor contrast between the letters and the background, so the more simple the typography, the less of a problem the contrast becomes.
Back to my site, this was certainly an issue with the Themes that I would have preferred to use in terms of the functionality that they offered, eg. 'Connections'. All of the font issues, and some of the functionality issues should have been resolved by choosing this theme, but for the fact that when I set Mrs S on the task of reading it she pretty much couldn't make out the words, especially on the tabs in the header. Furthermore, when I changed the theme the clarity of the images nearly knocked me off my chair - so that clinched it!
Main frame computers really are boring (I liked your term 'proper computers'!), they're only really good at crunching really huge amounts of data and for storing stuff. I suspect that with a bit of ingenuity I could do all that I did back then on Excell and even come up with a pretty report using mail merge, and even publish the results globally, just by the touch of a button - now crashing the Internet really would be fun - I guess that why there are so many geeks out there trying to do just that!
I guess the 'Contact Form' is really just another Widget but that Wordpress don't dress it up as such as it appears in another context, i.e. when writing a page rather than in 'Design' I also suspect that Wordpress only put it there reluctantly as it appears with loads of warnings about contact forms breeding spam. that would certainly explain why it only works where it works!
Ceasar, really liked your page and the may that to offer to work, e.g. building from code upwards, that's the way to go forward - good luck!
Simon
PS I also love your ingenuity re. the wifi!
