Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

finseth.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#41

Post by stinkytaco »

massysett wrote: post #29
gf263 wrote: post #24

I never understood why these webpages can't have like, 4 lines of CSS to make them much more readable. Preserve the older aesthetic I guess?

Maybe because the author's expertise is something other than writing HTML, so he picked up an old book on HTML, marked it up, and that's it. That the browser can render HTML written 20 years ago is quite a virtue. If it only takes 4 lines of CSS to make it more readable, then the page's lack of readability is more an indictment of the browser (which could do this tidying itself) rather than of the author, who should…

> then the page's lack of readability is more an indictment of the browser (which could do this tidying itself)

I strongly disagree with this. The browser should do nothing it is not explicitly made to do, which is one of the reasons it can still render HTML from 20 years ago. We used to have browsers that tried to do that kind of thing and we're only now extracting ourselves from that mess.

It is 100% on the website author to make their page more readable.

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#42

Post by edmccard »

AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #14

I once build a text editor using a rope[1] data structure where every line was a node. The tree was augmented[2] with information about line numbers, titles in the document... for very fast navigation. I don't think primitive data structures like a gap buffer are useful anymore. They come from a time where saving on memory was more important than it is now. EDIT: I forgot it was also a self balancing tree! Very cool…

>I don't think primitive data structures like a gap buffer are useful anymore.

Emacs seems to do just fine with gap buffers. And thinking about algorithms with greater complexity as being less primitive can obscure the fact that the complexity isn't always worth the tradeoff; see "Gap Buffers, or, Don't Get Tied Up With Ropes"[1]

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/02/18/gap-buffers-or-w...

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#43

Post by gf263 »

massysett wrote: post #29
gf263 wrote: post #24

I never understood why these webpages can't have like, 4 lines of CSS to make them much more readable. Preserve the older aesthetic I guess?

Maybe because the author's expertise is something other than writing HTML, so he picked up an old book on HTML, marked it up, and that's it. That the browser can render HTML written 20 years ago is quite a virtue. If it only takes 4 lines of CSS to make it more readable, then the page's lack of readability is more an indictment of the browser (which could do this tidying itself) rather than of the author, who should…

If you have something worth saying, you can take the 5 minutes it takes to make it readable.

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#44

Post by 0x445442 »

gwright wrote: post #5
cmyr wrote: post #4

I've been learning a lot lately by following along with the development of xi[1], a new text editor written in Rust. Through reading that project's RFCs I've then come across other interesting projects, like swiobe[2] and wi[3]. What are the other canonical resources on this topic? It feels like tons of the interesting thought is scattered around various blogs and usenet posts and the like. I'd love to create a nice…

Sam comes to mind as an interesting project in this area: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/sam/

Too reliant on the mouse.

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#45

Post by grzm »

gf263 wrote: post #24

I never understood why these webpages can't have like, 4 lines of CSS to make them much more readable. Preserve the older aesthetic I guess?

As pointed out elsewhere, the post is from 1999. You're effectively asking the author to, apart from creating the content, to also maintain it over the years to someone else's arbitrary satisfaction. I'm not sure if that's fair. The author likely has other project's they're working on, and maintaining the look of something they wrote 18 years ago isn't a priority.

Consider what would have happened if they had just published a book. Likely the book would be out of print and no longer available. This is definitely a step up from that.

If this is something that you truly care about, you may want to reach out to the author and offer to provide a maintenane update on your own. That said, be prepared for the author to perhaps consider even the little time it would take coordinating with you and performing any updates not worth their time. Then again, they may welcome your interest and willingness to help.

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#46

Post by zeveb »

albedoa wrote: post #39
zeveb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a bit awkward to read on large screens. Long lines and whatnot For years and years and years I always had a half-screen-width browser window, precisely because it's easier to read text that way. But then site authors started assuming that I'd have a full-width window, and using CSS to waste half the window width. I still think that the correct response to 'window too wide' is 'shrink the window,' but it's a lo…

Wait, why wouldn't the solution be "define a max width"? Site authors should not be wasting your window width, windows should not be "too wide" for text, and you shouldn't have to choose between the two solutions you mentioned.

Only because it seems to me that if the user really wants a terribly wide window … that's his choice. Who am I to prevent someone from doing something which seems stupid to me? Maybe he wants a half-inch high window at the bottom of his screen where he can scroll through my text slowly, or something. His call, not mine.

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#48

Post by massysett »

gf263 wrote: post #43
massysett wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because the author's expertise is something other than writing HTML, so he picked up an old book on HTML, marked it up, and that's it. That the browser can render HTML written 20 years ago is quite a virtue. If it only takes 4 lines of CSS to make it more readable, then the page's lack of readability is more an indictment of the browser (which could do this tidying itself) rather than of the author, who should…

If you have something worth saying, you can take the 5 minutes it takes to make it readable.

Learning CSS does not take 5 minutes.

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#49

Post by massysett »

stinkytaco wrote: post #41
massysett wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because the author's expertise is something other than writing HTML, so he picked up an old book on HTML, marked it up, and that's it. That the browser can render HTML written 20 years ago is quite a virtue. If it only takes 4 lines of CSS to make it more readable, then the page's lack of readability is more an indictment of the browser (which could do this tidying itself) rather than of the author, who should…

> then the page's lack of readability is more an indictment of the browser (which could do this tidying itself) I strongly disagree with this. The browser should do nothing it is not explicitly made to do, which is one of the reasons it can still render HTML from 20 years ago. We used to have browsers that tried to do that kind of thing and we're only now extracting ourselves from that mess. It is 100% on the website…

The whole point of vanilla HTML is that it has few presentation details. It has some headings, bold, italic, and such. If the page does not specify margins or font size, the browser absolutely should set these so it is most readable on the device. If I write plain HTML today I am not optimizing for some VR headset that will be used twenty years hence. The headset should render the plain HTML in a manner faithful to the semantic markup, not so it looks the same way it looked on Netscape with a VGA screen.

Re: The Craft of Text Editing (1999)

#50

Post by z3t4 »

As someone currently working on a code editor I love this stuff, but there's usually more focus on the technical part then the human part. With todays hardware we can do millions of stupid things every second and it will still feel snappy. We should spend more time trying to optimize for the humans instead of their computer.
Post reply on HN