[bborud]

You sound like me 19 years ago. I now think I was wrong, but I can understand where you are coming from.

Not caring about typography and how something looks is much like not caring about eye contact and tone of voice when talking to people: it is a bit autistic and generally doesn't help communication.

But as I said: I can understand where you are coming from. Most web design is terrible -- and the more money you spend on it, the worse it gets.

[ec429]

Well, I'm a bit autistic myself, so it's no surprise. But in fact I do care about typography (in particular, I obsessed over bad kerning /before/ xkcd mentioned it); I just think that typography /is not the job/ of the creator of the page. Essentially everything we know about typesetting running text has been successfully automated for years (heck, TeX could automagically typeset mathematical copy 34 /years/ ago), so _push that decision as close to the user as possible_.

It's very much a UNIXy attitude, and ties in to ideas like "mechanism, not policy". If stylistic fashion changes, much simpler for the browsers to update their presentation mechanisms than for every website to redesign their CSS. Policy should be pushed as close to the user as possible - but the flipside is that the user shouldn't have to decide anything you can reliably deduce automatically; applying this with the web designer considered as the user of HTML, CSS etc is left as an exercise for the reader.