Another Tuesday (Friday?), Another GtkDcoding Blog Post

[Ron Tarrant]

On Thursday, 21 March 2019 at 21:34:26 UTC, Michelle Long wrote:

> I'd suggest adding pictures! It's very easy to take a screen 
> shot and not much harder to link them and they offer far more 
> interest.

You're the second person to suggest this, so I'll explain my 
reasoning. I assure you, it's not because I'm lazy or don't know 
where the Print Screen button is. :)

My original plan was to include screenshots. Then I thought back 
over my own experiences with reading tutorial sites. I have a 
tendency to look at the screenshot, skim the article, 
copy-n-paste the code, and go off to do other things. I've also 
noticed this in others. It's often quite obvious someone hasn't 
read something carefully just by the questions they ask (present 
company excluded).

And I think images deter people from paying close attention while 
reading. I can't back this up with statistics or research other 
than my own, but I have noticed a decline in reading 
comprehension over the last 30 years as the Internet went from 
text-only to images and ads filling our screens.

So the bottom line is, by leaving out images, I feel I'm doing my 
bit for literacy. If there's nothing else besides text, it's all 
the reader has to engage with and I'm hoping this will engender a 
complete understanding of the subjects I cover... as much as is 
possible.

It's also why I keep the frills down to an absolute minimum. I've 
tossed thousands of words because they veered too far off topic 
or were written just to get a laugh or whatever.

And there you have it, the philosophy behind gtkDcoding.

Thanks for reading, Michelle. And keep the comments coming, 
please.