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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

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Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#401

Post by hashmal »

strenholme wrote: post #359
hashmal wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on why/how they suck? Do you have example links, to set a common ground for the conversation? I think most fonts that get your attention suck, the best ones are invisible and get you directly to the meaning of text, without getting in the way. So maybe there's a kind of bias (selection or sampling bias?) operating here?

I can’t speak for the parent poster, but, yes, back in the Myspace days, end users would do really tasteless CSS like Comic Sans or an italic font everywhere. Back then, I told my browser “I don’t care what font they tell you to use, just render it with Verdana”. These days, people either use their social network’s unchangeable CSS, or they use a Wordpress theme with an attractive and perfectly readable font. Even Me…

> back in the Myspace days, end users would do really tasteless CSS like Comic Sans or an italic font everywhere.

Indeed, typography is a skill. Most designers should have it though, which is why I asked more information to OP.

> The only time I have seen a page use obnoxious fonts in the 2010s is when the LibreSSL webpage used Comic Sans as a joke to highlight that the project could use more money

Ah, the infamous Comic Sans. It's a shame because as a typeface on its own, in its category, it is pretty good. Sadly, it's misused all the time in contexts where it's not appropriate at all.

> It may be a case that the parent poster likes using a delta hinted font, either Verdana or Georgia, on a low resolution monitor, and doesn’t like the blurry look of an anti-aliased font on a 75dpi screen.

Without more details we cannot guess. You're right: a lot of things can go wrong and ruin a typeface, regardless of how the characters are designed. Anti-protip: a reliable way to make any font look like shit is to keep the character drawings as they are and mess up the tracking (letter-spacing) and kerning.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#402

Post by artur_makly »

Right after we launched, we were pleasantly surprised that a good portion of our users started using our automated visual site-mapping platform [1] to archive their sites ( while redesigning newer versions of them ) and other public sites of interest.

[1] https://VisualSitemaps.com

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#403

Post by WalterBright »

duckmysick wrote: post #265
WalterBright wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. it's independent of the browser 2. it works with any browser 3. I can move it to any machine and use it 4. It is not transmitted to the browser vendor 5. Being a text file, it is under my control 6. I can back it up 7. I don't need some database manager to access it 8. I can add notes and anything else to the file 9. It's stupid simple

What happens when the website itself becomes unavailable?

The link stops working.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#404

Post by zzo38computer »

hashmal wrote: post #293
zzo38computer wrote: post #29

I do believe that, usually, you should make it possible to be archived. (In one of a few cases where it isn't, consider if HTTP(S) is even the correct protocol for what you are doing; sometimes it isn't.) I agree that you can (almost always) write HTML without JavaScript codes (CSS is not always needed either, but nevertheless it can be helpful). This improves portability too. If you do want to use JavaScript to gene…

"monospace" is a property of a given font but is not (usually) a variant of a single font family as is "bold" (font weight). While bold text is often used for emphasis and setting it to "regular" doesn't change the meaning much, using a monospace font signals specific things (often, it's used to represent code snippets, but in some contexts it can mean "work in progress"). Changing that font to a proportional one str…

Even Glk, which has styles meant for meaning and use rather than formatting, nevertheless has a monospace style, since some things need to be displayed using a monospace font to be displayed correctly. However, you could just as well display all text using a monospace font, if you are using only one font, so you might not be able to "signal specific things" by the use of a monospace font.

For the case of headings, this can be done without specifying the font yourself; if you specify it is a heading, then the rendering software can decide how to display it. (HTML has and and so on for headings, and Glk has style_Header and style_Subheader.)

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#405

Post by zzo38computer »

hashmal wrote: post #318
chrismorgan wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, in almost all places that monospaced fonts are used, they’re purely a stylistic choice. (The remainder is mostly ASCII art, or plain-text representations of tables—in which case alignment is important, not the font—or something where tabular figures are desirable for number alignment.) I don’t say that that makes it useless in any way, but honestly monospaced text in code editing is overrated. You can live…

I agree about monospaced text in code editing. I was thinking about uses such as code excerpts in literature (class names, inline bash commands, etc). Monospaced fonts[1] plays a major role in helping reading and understanding the content. This is more than a stylistic choice. [1] actually the font doesn't need to be monospaced, but it must be very different than the font used for main copy.

While in some cases the font doesn't necessary need to be monospaced, some documents might require that a monospaced font is used, so it should be monospaced anyways. Although, as you say, different from the main copy; so if all of the text is monospaced, there should be some way to distinguish it, such as by selecting a different monospaced font, or displaying it with a different colour.

(One case where a monospace font is required is if you are automatically including text from another document which uses plain text format; there is no way to determine what format is needed, but monospace will always work.)

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#406

Post by miguelmota »

Is there a browser extension that can automatically add a site that you bookmark to the Wayback Machine and fetch the bookmarked site from the Wayback Machine if it 404's? I really hate it when I bookmark something and come back to it months or years later to find that the page doesn't exist any more so having something to automatically pull it from the web archive would be amazing

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#407

Post by strenholme »

hashmal wrote: post #401
strenholme wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t speak for the parent poster, but, yes, back in the Myspace days, end users would do really tasteless CSS like Comic Sans or an italic font everywhere. Back then, I told my browser “I don’t care what font they tell you to use, just render it with Verdana”. These days, people either use their social network’s unchangeable CSS, or they use a Wordpress theme with an attractive and perfectly readable font. Even Me…

> back in the Myspace days, end users would do really tasteless CSS like Comic Sans or an italic font everywhere. Indeed, typography is a skill. Most designers should have it though, which is why I asked more information to OP. > The only time I have seen a page use obnoxious fonts in the 2010s is when the LibreSSL webpage used Comic Sans as a joke to highlight that the project could use more money Ah, the infamous C…

I think one of the reasons Comic Sans got such a bad rep is because it was one of the relatively few available fonts back in the pre-woff “web safe fonts” era of a decade ago. Microsoft should had given us a more general purpose font, such as a nice looking slab serif to fill the gap between the somewhat old-fashioned looking Georgia and the very stylized Trebuchet MS font.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#408

Post by joveian »

hashmal wrote: post #285
ryandrake wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or don’t specify any font at all and leave it up to the user’s preference. Why presume you know better than the user?

When you go to a restaurant you let the chef prepare food for you. Telling him to back off and let you cook because he can't know better than you (his user) would be absurd. Same thing with design and typography. It requires skill and taste, and hopefully people will be delighted or simply consume the content for what it is, because the design/cooking just reveals that content in a convenient/useful shape.

Most people have the means to cook for themselves without going anywhere and do so at least the vast majority of the time. Even if you do go to a restaurant, they almost always have menus rather than just making one dish for everyone since some people have styles of cooking that they prefer or don't like. People rarely design their own font but rather pick from professionally designed fonts. Additionally, at restaurants people pay for food so incentives are aligned while on the web people generally don't pay for content and any design professional involved is likely an advertiser. I rarely read stuff on the web for a design experience but for the content. I suspect most people would be unhappy with a newspaper that changed fonts for every story or a book that changed fonts every chapter.

Personally, I've been setting my browser to use only DejaVu fonts with a 16pt minimum for years (maybe a decade now) and every time I briefly use a default browser profile I notice the fonts and think not just "this is bad" but "how can people live like this?". Even with the usually minor issues that often appear, setting my own fonts is a way better experience than not doing so. My default experience is much closer to Firefox reader mode than it is to what the page specifies in most cases.

IMO, font speicification should be limited to serif, sans-serif, or monospace and let the user or browser set the actual font. Desingers should not rely on exact sizes of fonts or use custom icon fonts.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#409

Post by neilobremski »

These points look like the old (timeless) guidelines I remember for creating a web page ... solid, good, and as plain as a saltine cracker. I love it and it stores well but convincing the world while we romp through the hype of technological progress is like following a mob through the streets telling them to pick up their garbage.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#410

Post by xwowsersx »

every wrote: post #397
xwowsersx wrote: post #64

Maybe I'm dense, but I'm having trouble understanding what is so difficult about keeping content around. It seems like the issue of webpack and node and all the other things he mentions on the article aren't really problems with content per se. You can just publish your thoughts as a plain text file or markdown or whatever and you're good to go. I'm having a hard time thinking of types of content that are really tied…

"I'd love to see an extreeeemely minimal tool which lets you drop some files in a folder and then create an index page that links to those." I use the tree command on BSD to do just that. It has the option of creating html output with a number of additional options. An example: tree -P *.txt -FC -H http://baseHREF -T 'Your Title' -o index.html

Oh wow thanks for sharing. I use tree all the time, but had no idea you could do this. baseHREF should be the full root domain, e.g. example.com?
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