[dylan604]

Hey TechDirt! What's the point of making a image of text to embed in your site? Its text becomes blurry and hard to read compared to using an actual font. What a horrible decisions for legibility.

But seriously, what's the thought process for a website to do this? Even embedded tweets are not pre-rendered images. Some one in some meeting decided that using a rasterized image would be awesomesauce. What kind of sick people were involved?

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

I think it's a reasonable way to present it as evidence of what had been available from someone else's server rather than just words that are presented by their own server. From an accessibility perspective, it would be nice if they could ensure that a screen reader will start reading the text when it encounters the image but it otherwise seems to be a good reporting practice.

[dylan604]

If it was a scan of an actual document embedded into a webpage, then maybe we can say it's an acceptable format. But having some designer do a layout and then save it as a rasterized image so that it scales beyond original size so that it lowers the legibility of the text, then no, it is not a reasonable method.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> scan of an actual document embedded into a webpage

I see, download the HTML as provided by the server at the time. Then provide that separately and include the relevant text in the article. Yeah, that would be a better method.

[dylan604]

We've had full page documents as PDFs for a long long time now. This isn't new. It's just someone wanting to be fancy/trendy/whatevs without consideration that people use the web in ways other than the designers do.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

I’m thinking about it similar to how American law enforcement is required to store digital evidence, in particular the requirement that it’s “unmodified”. Per my understanding, that would disqualify, e.g., a .jpg that was converted to a .png from being submitted as evidence.

Obviously a journalist isn’t law enforcement but a good one will still gather and retain evidence. They also don’t necessarily need to be as strict as prosecutors but it’s a good standard to try to emulate. To that end, a PDF wouldn’t do.

I wouldn’t doubt that these assumptions are overly generous to the reality of their evidence-gathering; it’s a bit idealistic and the implementation is lacking, at best. But if that’s their point behind the screenshot instead of inline text, I still think they’re coming from the right place. They mostly just have a bad implementation.

But at the same time, I get where you’re coming from, even assuming more responsible intentions. A bit more applied critical thinking in such a context likely results in a better implementation. That is largely why the above assumptions seem so generous.

[nickdurfe]

??? Those images aren't blurry or hard to read at all. What does it really matter if they embed a legible image or use text?

[munk-a]

When you decide to use a non-default format you adopt all of the responsibility to make that work: How do I select text from this image to reference it in a discussion? How does my screen reader handle the information? Does this text scale and wrap if I need to zoom due to a visual impairment? Can I use a high readability font with this text? If I color invert my browser how readable is this text?

This whole thread is wildly off topic to the article but I really wish developers would think more thoroughly before rejecting standards and rolling their own.

[nkrisc]

> What does it really matter if they embed a legible image or use text?

It matters if you’re using a screen reader or browsing without downloading images due to limited bandwidth. Images also don’t resize text or change contrast to match my browser settings.

[dylan604]

Yes, those images are not blurry, that's precisely the reason I described them as blurry. /s

If all you do is read things on a microscopic mobile screen, maybe the sizing didn't scale a raster image beyond it's native size. For those of us boomers that read things on screens with plenty of screen space, things get scaled with that fancy mobile first responsive layout so that images are scaled larger than their normal size.

So as soon as you're willing to accept that not everyone views the web like you, we can all have a better experience. That's not just for the web page's designer, but for other readers on forums making comments about things they don't know about.