David Scotson

The reasoning behind them is:

• Lucida Grande for those on Mac OS X (it's the system font and so is uber-tweaked for on-screen display using the Macs display layer technology)

• Verdana for Windows users, especially those on pre-2000 systems without anti-aliasing as it, like Trebuchet, is designed expressly for that purpose, though I think more successfully and less showily. Ironically, that is the reason behind its 'fatness'. read more at MSFT

• Bitstream Vera Sans for those on more modern Linux desktops who have not installed (or can't install) the MSFT fonts.

• Geneva to catch any Mac OS 9 users, like Verdana this font is specifically designed for non-anti-aliased display (you can see it in your iPod if you've got one)

• Lucida is a fairly common and somewhat screen legible font on older Unix and Linux machines

• Arial and Helvetica, just in case, to catch any stragglers.

I got the inspiration from real word style.

Everything after the first two is basically disaster-planning to ensure the site remains good-looking or at least somewhat legible on various kooky set-ups. The first two are my personal opinions and Verdana is probably interchangeable here with Trebuchet.

I always add Lucida Grande first as I think it's a bit of a shame to have Mac OS X users reading using a font expressly designed to overcome a technical shortcoming that their system doesn't suffer from. Actually, thinking about it now, I'd probably promote Vera Sans above Verdana/Trebuchet for similar reasons if legibility was more important than consistency.

It appears that Google is using something quite complicated to guess when there is a link between emails rather than rely just on these headers. But it does seem to take them into account as my other mailing lists have these and it succeeds in matching them even as the subject line changes.

Gmail support database on incorrectly threaded 'discussions'

Do you use your gmail account to receive Moodle mails?

The really nifty conversation feature doesn't work with my mail from Moodle.org and each message on a topic is listed separately.

I don't know how or why this works (or not, in this case) but it would be neato if it worked for Moodle generated mails.

(Apple's Mail.app also has a neat threaded view, I'm not sure whether Moodle mails confuse this, or any other mailer, as I only switched the option on after Gmail convinced me of its usefulness)

edit: Slight clarification, this does sort-of work sometimes (say 1-2% of the time) when a person comments twice in the same thread.

I'd support switching it back as the THEAD tag isn't really adding much here, as it is intended for long tables where you might want the heading to be repeated (on every page of a print out perhaps) and is very poorly supported anyway.

It might make slighly more sense to swap the TD (table data) tag for a TH (table header) tag but it's not essential either.

Investigating further it appears that the public access introductory Moodle course at the Melburne University links to the Moodle Community forum as a resource. And the last time the Google spider visited their site it grabbed the front page of Moodle as if it was part of theirs.


Perhaps the same thing happened at naver.com, it is again an outdated snapshot of the front page that has been captured.