If you don’t mind answering a question, is it less costly in terms of “bandwidth” to post fine print?

Catharine — not really. In fact, it’s very slightly more “expensive”, because the “blockquote” and “end-blockquote” tags have to be sent.

Strictly, “bandwidth” is the capacity in bits per second, but since we (for practical purposes) have constant bandwidth, we commonly abuse the terminology and talk about the number of bits per billing period as the “bandwidth”. So, for example, I just figured out the other day that Glenn Reynolds sends (and pays for) about 65 gigabytes a day on one of his 260k pageview days.

Every character typed requires one byte of data, no matter what font it’s in. It’s your browser’s job to “render” those characters so the look right. Figuring this basic idea out is what got Tim Berners-Lee knighted a few weeks ago.