This article makes some good points but it fails in one respect to follow it's own premises. It starts with a nice and funny but completely useless image. This might be a pet peeve of mine but I really prefer articles that get straight to the point and start with their main argument. For good examples see the blogs of Drew DeVault, Dan Luu or Gwern.
EDIT: Ha, I should not comment without having read the article thoroughly to the end. It indeed addresses this very point:
"You are no doubt aware that this article begins with a picture. The reason I include pictures in most of my articles is in the unlikely event that an average Internet user stumbles upon one, he will be less likely to leave immediately."
Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really ties in with and adds to the content that follows?
> Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really ties in with and adds to the content that follows?
I don't think picture itself is the thing, human seek novelty and visual impressions come naturally. If you can afford to design each page to be slightly different and memorable you should achieve the same effect, if there is one.
And while WCAG checkers all swear that both this site and the linked tilde.town pass text contrast guidelines with flying (* ahem *) colors, my eyes just cannot cope with trying to read the text on those backgrounds.
Thanks for the feedback. In trying to make the text look good in medium to small screens, I hadn't considered what the page could look like for people reading on a screen that is more than 1440 pixels across. I've modified the css file. Clear your browsing history and try looking at the article again.
Are you the author? Thanks for nice article, I always love to confirm my own opinions! I agree with ebg13, the presentation of your article could be a little more attractive. On a web made for reading there are few simple style rules I use for all text. 1st, I use a line-height of at least 1.5 because every browser's default line spacing is too narrow. (Quanta Magazine gets posted here a lot and I think their average line height is 1.875.) 2nd, keep column width to 100 characters or below (the article already meets this). And 3rd, keep background colors desaturated as to not distract from the most important part of the website: the text!
Yes, I'm the author. I try hard to accommodate as many browsers/apps/screen sizes/devices/reader preferences as possible. But given the large number of them, it is not possible to make every reader 100% happy. I've found that keeping things simple generally works well for most people. For those who want to leave comments about the problems associated with their particular approach to reading my website, I have given them a place to do so: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/cheapskatesguide-and-b....
If you want to see an example of what (I and some others) think is a nice typographic layout for the web have a look at https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
It is what I used for my personal blog and I've liked it a great deal.
on a related note, walls of text are not particularly attractive. i'd suggest using a rule-of-3: sub-divide any sections longer than 3 paragraphs using sub-headers.
it also helps to sharpen the main throughline, and leave tangents in asides, tables/diagrams, footnotes, links, and similar (possibly even a popup in the right circumstance, like a definitional aside).
I agree that your screenshot is not very readable, but on the contrary, I think that if you make your browser window that large, you are naturally going to get text that's sized similarly.
Personally, I find the site readable --- and far better than a lot of others.
I don't like it either, but at least I can disable CSS. But I think for most documents, it is probably better to just write it without CSS. And then, it will already be optimized for whatever display they are using presumably; you don't have to make it one way for one user, one way for other, etc, which will never be suitable for everyone, anyways.
User stylesheets are even part of the standard. The fact that the most common (and maybe "oppressive") browser doesn't support them is itself a problem.
Doing that if one wants to is one thing. But to say we all "should" is another. Anyone who expects users to load their own css for every site they visit has lost his grip on reality.
Yes, I sometimes do this with a lot of stuff. Also sometimes to get rid of animations, worthless popup messages, bugs in the CSS that the site provided, wasted space, too big fonts, etc. Sometimes just disabling CSS helps, but sometimes not. Even on here on Hacker News, I added CSS to make all comment texts black, and to add a dotted vertical line to the left of indented comments so that it is more easily to see which one belongs with which one.
Usually, if a web page doesn't already have a CSS though, then it is already good and I won't need to add one.
I actually want the ability to have "privileged" CSS commands which can only be specified by the end user, including meta-CSS.
I love this idea. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing better than a well executed modern site with all the bells and whistles, but there is still the adage , just because you can, doesn't mean you should. People reading news, want just that, nothing more, well, I guess that is what I prefer.
Many of us have been pursuing personal projects to breathe new life into old technologies:
Nick Black has been doing great work creating a successor to ncurses. He took the latest and greatest modern C++ / UNICODE development practices, and made it work really well for the old school terminal stuff from decades ago, which was easier said that done. https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses
See also Cosmopolitan, which is more focused on the use case: "All I want is stdio and math; how can I do that without all the breaking builds and broken hearts?" https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
Please consider supporting us. These old technologies are widely supported and have stood the test of time. Any positive developments towards making them fresh again, is going to benefit both you and the technology community as a whole.
Can't say anything about Cosmopolitan, but I'm a huge fan of TUI:s, so notcurses is a great initiative.
However, a text-centric web doesn't have to be "old technology". With HTML5 and CSS3, pages can look and feel very modern indeed and still not use tons of JavaScript frameworks. And with just a bit of added care, things can work swell in TUI browsers, phones and "modern" browsers alike.
I agree that the web is an outstanding platform. Many things exist that command line programs are much better at doing, e.g. web serving, text editing, matrix multiplication, and relu. We need to know that PCs will continue to be an open affordable alternative, which continues to maintain backward compatibility as designed. Technologies such as WebAssembly and GPU interfaces are still too new and experimental for many of us to feel comfortable opening it up to every news website we visit. We need to know that operating system vendors will continue to feel comfortable allowing us to easily share simple open source programs that have access to things like Intel's new instructions.
Oh, I just meant that text-centric doesn’t necessarily mean it should be considered ”old”: plenty of nifty features of semantic markup and CSS can be utilized to make a ”plaintext” web page look and feel very contemporary. That excludes things like JS, WebAssembly, WebGL etc.
A good stand-in for page quality to me is size of bodytext:total payload. I should analyze my own blog to see what that ratio comes down to, I'd hope it would be quite good.
"to wish that the average engineer would suddenly begin to care about using his work day productively."
I know no one likes to hear this but if you must pick a pronoun for a hypothetical "average" engineer you should use "they" or "she" to help readers be more mindful of the unconscious bias in our field.
Policing the language, unfortunately, does not bring change to the situation. Everyone who has lived in a totalitarian state knows this.
“Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.” Oswald Spengler
Chill out, friend. Parent comment kindly suggested the use of a gender neutral noun to make the passage more inclusive. No one is forcing you to use nonexclusionary language. If you want to exclude over half of the world's population over fears of an invented oppressive regime then you are most welcome to.
This is a somewhat aggressive distortion of my words. I was merely referring to the fact that forcing the use of incorrect English will not help in the current situation of gender imbalance. And a reference to the "unconscious bias in our field" in the parent comment needs concrete citations and evidence to be of value to the discussion.
How I truly wish there were more women in the field! But very few choose that profession, unfortunately. That is sad... I am not ready, however, to speculate about the reasons, since I don't have enough information.
That is the reason for the reference to oppressive regimes - only there do people cripple the language to keep everything neutral and soulless, and only there do people make unverified assertions about non-existent enemies and conspirators.
You're too quick to make assumptions about people who speak with you. English grammar, for example, does not have any facilities to create gender-neutral pronouns for every single noun (only for some). It's just a fact whether we like it or not. German, for instance, is more flexible in this regard. But languages evolve over centuries, and changes to grammar cannot be organically introduced to suit a new thinking on social life (however reasonable it is).
Unfortunately, it’s far too common to see your words twisted if you do not conform to some groups’ views on social justice. You made a good and valid point, don’t let others bully you into changing your beliefs.
What's even more unfortunate is that my views generally align with theirs - liberal and democratic. Yet those groups often very quickly put down any serious discussion, even if there is a minor and delicate criticism of their assertions. We should be more calm, especially in matters where we generally agree.
What "incorrect English" is being suggested? If it's the singular "they", then you must at least concede there's some debate about it, but most scholars have no grammatical problem with it. Using the term "forced" here also does a bit of a disservice to actual cases of compelled speech and restriction of speech (by governments, corporations etc.) - GP was very explicit that you're free to use the pronouns you want. If that's not unforced, I don't know what is.
>will not help in the current situation of gender imbalance
I'm not sure about "they" because it's so commonplace, but "she" might definitely cause someone to do a double-take. In fact, in academic philosophy, "she" instead of the expected "he" in thought experiments is very common, and on amateur philosophy forums, you can see that it does make people double take. Maybe that fact is something in favor of the argument that we tend to assume, as English language stylists have frequently in the past, that a third person is for some reason by default a "he". Arguably, being 'forced' to consider by reading why we were thrown off by a 'she' instead of a 'he' could go some way to seeing if we have the unconscious biases GP assumed exist. That 'evidence' might just lie with some introspection.
When the author writes about the "average" developer, that is--without ambiguity in a probability density distribution--definitely a male. To use "he/him" pronouns in that context is accurate.
The contention, I think, is that not every author wants to introduce sociopolitical agenda into their writing. However, there is a large contingent of the community that wishes to force political commentary into every word written. And with that, many are aggressive, threatening, and in some cases, dangerous. (To careers, relationships, etc.)
With that context in mind, you are absolutely correct that the grandparent was friendly and made a neutral suggestion with no threat of force. However, that is not always the case, and it is becoming more common for it to be a demand rather than a request.
As such, some people do feel threatened by the consequences of the growing vocal majority. Your parents' reaction may have been a little over the top, but it's a real concern for some people as they watch the trend to an unknown end.
Please understand that some people feel just as "othered" by the group that enforces "otherment" on people who do not prescribe to their pronoun agenda. If the equality crew doesn't like to be "othered", I imagine they can at least understand that others might feel threatened by being "othered", as well.
And, of course, many of them feel delighted by the "others" feeling "othered". Not everyone agrees that this is a healthy mode of change. And I think that is what your parent was reacting to.
It is not unconscious, it is conscious because most engineers are men. Women can become engineers exactly the same way they became doctors or lawyers, then we will refer to engineers differently to represent that.
You really should not speak for all female engineers, as it is a generalization, which is against your rules as I understand them. There were 50% of women in my previous team. My wife successfully switched to IT several years ago. Maybe the key to success is just to do your thing and not to whine about the unfairness of this world? It’s a bit more difficult than fighting for pronouns, but it makes more sense.
No, in English one uses 'they' for the third-person plural and 'she' for the third-person singular for females and objects which contain humans (e.g. buildings, ships and cars); for the third-person singular for animate objects of unknown gender one just uses the default 'he.'
This is not true. Using 'they' as a third-person singular is incredibly common, is becoming increasingly so, and has been in use for hundreds of years.
This is also the case in some Romance languages, and I've always been put off by presumptuous "he"s or "she"s in the ambiguous case when the writer could have just said "they".
While there are some truths in the article, many that I share, I think the author usually reaches to wrong conclusions from some true premises.
Text only websites, while revolutionary and nerdy, are not the solution. We need well designed websites, optimized and lightweight. Images and videos are incredibly powerful, attractive, and can give an incredible amount of information (the cat example is ridiculous), removing them makes no sense.
If you think too many people read gossip magazines and tabloids, don't blame the pictures and go asking for text only magazines and books. Blame the publishers chasing easy money, blame the education system, blame the amygdala... But not images.
Yeah, I think the author overgeneralises that videos are a bad medium for technical information. I watch a few channels with ML paper discussions and they are incredibly well made, maybe better than reading the paper itself for grasping the core message.
Yes, I should think so, too. Use a subset of HTML, with no CSS, and using commands such as <H1> and so on to specify headings and so on. Will any browser have a "table of contents" menu that uses these headings to automatically generate a table of contents?
I haven't read the whole article, but I'd like to add that I really love to see more simpler webpages. For many sites (e.g. news), text only would be fine.
In Thailand (where I live) I recently found a super-cheap internet subscription, paying about 1,00 USD (30 THB) per month [0]. Of course, this internet is really slow, not usable for modern sites / web apps like YouTube or Google Maps. But could be very decent if more sites would be trimmed in content to the bare essentials.
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