Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: bold text (was scriptingNews outline for 1/22/00)
In the sort of work I do, I've failed if the end-users ever become aware of my efforts. And my web pages are strictly for my own enjoyment, that there happen to be a couple of hundred people with foibles similar to my own who check in to my daily babblings is a happy quirk; I don't go out of my way to attract readers. So it gives me great freedoms to snipe from my safe, remote seat.
I've been trying to get out of my car more and more, to skate and bike to do my errands and what-have-you. Even up here in trendy Marin it's a difficult thing to do, local ordinances keep skaters out of various parts of various towns, bike racks are often hard to find, locking to parking meters says "mash my bike, it's a target!"
The most effective way I've found to change people's attitudes about skating is to tell merchants that they're alienating my demographic. "Yeah, I'd like to purchase from you, but you're making it difficult for ahead-of-the-curve young computer professionals with large discretionary budgets to patronize your store."
So I offer my comments in that spirit. Yes, it's your personal pages to do with as you will, but you're making it difficult for arrogant narcissistic long-haired assembly language coders with questionable personal habits (or at least one of them) to read your web site. Either I'm part of your target demographic or I'm not, your call. I'm just offering feedback from my warped perspective.
My first choice is, of course, to read those who've taken the time to be brief, but there's no question that writing short is harder than writing long. It may also be the case that if I got used to reading lots of interspersed bold words they'd be less distracting, but I think then they'd lose their import as well. I actually found that reading Dave's sample "everything-bold with the critical elements in normal" text was easier because it didn't break up my flow as much.
Perhaps subtle color changes would be less distracting but still let scanners pick up the words they wanted. (This is where the original vision of HTML, as a content specification language that let users customize their own browsers, was a good thing. If you used the
I like interspersed headlines with short paragraphs that link to longer documents. I think the paper version of the Wall Street Journal is a triumph of information design for this reason (and a few others).
Anyway, this is proof only that I need way more hours in a day, 'cause now I'm all fired up to write a proxy server that implements some per-URL appearance changing code, and some code to talk to the Manila API so that I can experiment with tools to make writing short links to longer articles more natural, but I've gotta work on making this piece of obscure hardware I'm working on jump through hoops. Sigh.
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