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by giraffe_lady 1488 days ago
y'all are the most boring people on the planet istg. in the entire legion of internet writers making in depth technical content there is what, one who deviates from the conventions and you can't handle it.

This author is a much much better writer than average for free technical content! They have an interesting, unique style! The typography and punctuation are part of that style! It would be tangibly worse if they adhered to the (bad, and also arbitrary!) typographical conventions of raw html just to please a bunch of square-ass nerds. Shit just makes me sad seriously.

6 comments

> y'all are the most boring people on the planet

Citation needed. Please cite your source and make sure you strictly follow MLA format

We like what we like and we're allowed to like it. Same goes to you and her.
> They have an interesting, unique style! The typography and punctuation are part of that style!

Her 'interesting, unique' 'typography and punctuation' makes me want to poke my eyes out instead of focusing on the content itself. You sneer at conventions, but they were developed after centuries of typesetting and typewriting.

Her entire style sheet is an abomination:

- The serif typeface she has used, EB Garamond, is best used for printed text. I am working on a 27" 1080p monitor, and the low DPI makes for very painful reading. Sans-serif humanist typefaces like Verdana (used at Hacker News, thank goodness) or Open Sans are best.

Better still, use the OS typeface in `font-family` (`-apple-system`, Segoe UI, SF Pro, Roboto, Lucida, Ubuntu, Open Sans, etc) instead of dragging in your own. If one so desperately wants a serif typeface, please use something that's nice and blocky, like Droid Serif or IBM Plex Serif.

Incidentally, I have the same qualms with the default typeface in LaTeX: the Computer Modern provided is far too spindly for digital reading. There is an alternative, MLModern[0] that is thicker, but it only has Type 1 glyphs rather than OpenType.

- The colours she has chosen are not as bad, but they are certainly distracting. Can't go wrong with a monochrome dark grey/white, or even straightforward black on white.

- Uppercase/lowercase letters and proper punctuation help break up the prose, and improve the reading experience by differentiating proper nouns, beginnings of sentences, etc etc. Dismissing this by saying 'Oooh, look at me, I'm different for different's sake' is just exasperating.

Incidentally, I'm probably of a similar age group as the writer, but I like to follow grammatical and typographical rules in long prose (I don't care as much in personal texts), because they make sense.

[0]: https://ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern?lang=en

Best part is, every programmer has their own unique style as well. It doesn't stop us from running clang-format though
The reason it's important to stick to established standards is precisely to avoid discussions like this. It's a total waste of engineering time, so, in this case, be boring.

  “Oh look, I am a rebel ignoring what they taught me to do in third grade”.  
It certainly is a “style”, cheap.