[nverba]

I think this is a bridge too far. Justin Jackson made a good point about approaching your content first etc, but stripping back to just plain text just makes this harder to read. In fact, if you've read the first post http://justinjackson.ca/words.html, I'd argue that this almost impossible to read through to the end without skipping. Which sort of dilutes the whole point...

Perhaps the post should read:

This is a regular text file. Nothing advanced and not much to see here but some words. And you're pretty sure you've read this already, quite recently in fact...

AND THAT'S ANNOYING!

You're probably not even reading this bit, as most of you will have elected to skip to the end only to find I'm plugging something.

Now that's amazing...

[ajanuary]

The whole point is that it /is/ hard to read. That it isn't just about content, but how that content is presented.

> All these people didn't manage to get the driver compiled and installed, one cause surely was that the readme author didn't care about how to present the content at all. He just cared about functionality.

> If a client wants to get something done, I'd like to challenge you to think about user expierence (UX). If you want to sell products you will have more success with some good designs and layouts.

By taking it to an exteme of just a text file they're demonstrating that to communicate the content you need to present it effectively, and nice fancy layouts help with that.

[nverba]

I think I was conflicted over the idea of making a point by making said point hard to read. But to be fair, since I last read the text file, the width has been fixed up, which has... made it much easier to read (the original was full width lines). If it had originally been presented in it's current format, I would have never made my comment.

[agargarg]

> In fact, if you've read the first post http://justinjackson.ca/words.html, I'd argue that this almost impossible to read through to the end without skipping.

That's interesting: I saw the plaintext version first, which I had no problem reading. But in the HTML version, the fact that all bold sentences are pretty mundane and the excessive use of italic and bold just made me want to skip the whole page. In fact I didn't even notice it was the same content until I went back to your post!

[alan_cx]

My instant thought is that the bold headings draw the eye away from the bit you are currently reading.

"You" read the first heading, and decide to read the plain text below. As you are reading that, your eyes notice another heading below what you are reading, and if the paragraph you are currently reading is not holding your attention enough, the next heading gets your attention. Your eyes then leave the paragraph you are currently reading because the heading below it now has your attention. So, you start on the next paragraph and the whole thing loops as you go down the page.

So, I would suggest that one should use headings and attention grabbers as little as possible, make the paragraphs worth reading, and try to get the message of the paragraph across in the first sentence or two.

Does that work?

[nverba]

The plain text file has been fixed up since I made my comment. I agree, the plain text file is now quite easy to read, making my snarky comment look quite silly... :)