241–250 of 444 posts
This is a really great list (well, maybe not link previews, but everything else). Sidenotes in particular are something I want to see basically everywhere, not just blogs. Modern screens have tons of horizontal space, text is most readable in pretty fairly narrow columns anyway, and scrolling to the bottom just to read a footnote (or, worse, having it pop up in some janky pop-over) is really unpleasant. Happy to see…
This is a really great list (well, maybe not link previews, but everything else). Sidenotes in particular are something I want to see basically everywhere, not just blogs. Modern screens have tons of horizontal space, text is most readable in pretty fairly narrow columns anyway, and scrolling to the bottom just to read a footnote (or, worse, having it pop up in some janky pop-over) is really unpleasant. Happy to see…
Good list, though here comes my Hacker News-style pesky comment: Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt. Ragged text is much easier to read. Uneven and beautiful, like a plant whose details you rest your eyes upon as you observe, rather than a uniform concrete structure where vision is lost. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)
I totally agree. I think its because it lets my eyes get their bearings, like sensing the terrain.
And lowercase letters are easier to read than ALL CAPITALIZED LETTERS IN A HORIZONTAL LINE OF TEXT.
Justified text is the same thing, but vertically. Your eye reaches the end of the line, and the next one is likely slightly longer or shorter, so it is easier for your eyes to find the next line instead of reading the same line over again, and also easier to see the whole shape of a particular paragraph you want to refer to later.
I do like well-hyphenated justified paragraphs in print, that also let you fit more words per page. But even there, I prefer the organic, non-uniform look of ragged text.
Nice list! I like many of these "microfeatures" too. Some I have on my site ( https://evalapply.org ), some I don't because I don't want to require Javascript for blog functionality. I think I have a few others not in that list. This is my set of "microfeatures", which are all available in the post I linked below [1]. - All posts must have title, summary, dates (published, updated), one tag at least, and hot link to…
Maybe it's just me, but I'm not so much of a fan of Dialogs as demonstrated here, especially when there are a lot of characters, each of which have a different role that is only communicated by going to a separate page to read about them. If I wanted to explain something in an article I was writing, I would just explain it in the same way I'd do everything else, with a separate paragraph, maybe with some links to rel…
Somewhere in the middle, is decades of the "…for Dummies" technical manual formula and its stock dialog characters and the love affair many had (or still have) with "The Poignant Guide to Ruby".
Dialogs can definitely be hard to read in the context of just reading a single blog post because you don't have a familiarity with that author's characters and most blog authors don't have a "shared universe" of characters. I wonder if there's an interesting world where for instance the Dummies characters were considered to be public domain at the right time or more blog writers felt confident with _why's unique voices to turn Poignant's characters into a modern "Punch & Judy" for technical writing. The Socratic Method worked because everyone had a shared intuition on the characters of the day (in part because many were famous Senators and/or Wrestlers): Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, etc. (Also, Plato was his wrestling name, these were absolutely characters.) Maybe if we want to use more Dialogs in blog posts easily we need better shared characters?
Maybe it's just me, but I'm not so much of a fan of Dialogs as demonstrated here, especially when there are a lot of characters, each of which have a different role that is only communicated by going to a separate page to read about them. If I wanted to explain something in an article I was writing, I would just explain it in the same way I'd do everything else, with a separate paragraph, maybe with some links to rel…
I especially love the progress-oriented table of contents/nav highlighting which section(s) you're currently viewing using the Intersection Observer API.
I try to make [mine](https://rednafi.com) center aligned on all clients.
Since this article mention's Gwern's site several times: While I admire Gwern's work a lot, I often find his website is trying to do so much that my browser will really struggle. Especially on mobile. It's bad enough I usually avoid reading there, which is a shame. I'm not sure exactly what causes it, but it might be a combination of page length with many layers of nested, richly formatted and embedded content.
I much prefer the brutalist look of Drew Devault, Fabien Sanglard, or Dan Luu's site.
I have developed an entirely different approach to these blog/site features - such as sidenotes and TOC - that I refer to as an “Iceberg Article”. It is explained here: https://john.kozubik.com/pub/IcebergArticle/tip.html “An Iceberg Article is a single page of writing which links to a larger collection of supporting documents, resources and services.”