Is D the Answer to the One vs. Two Language High ,Performance Computing Dilemma?

Nick Sabalausky SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com
Sun Aug 11 23:53:44 PDT 2013


On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 20:01:27 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> I personally prefer single-column with no more than about 40 ems in
> width or thereabouts. Anything more than that, and it becomes
> uncomfortable to read.
> 

For me, it's closer to 80. With 40 the line breaks are too frequent for
my eyes. And it just "feels" cramped.


> 
> - No full justification by default. Existing justification schemes
> could be improved (most implementations suffer from rivers of
> whitespace in a justified paragraph -- they could learn from LaTeX
> here). Needs native hyphenation support (using JS to patch up this
> flaw is a failure IMO).
> 

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of justified text. Obviously I can live
with it, but even without the occasional "rivers of whitespace" issue,
I find the lack of jagged edges gives my eyes too few reference points,
so I end up losing my place more easily. The value of justified text's
smooth edges, to me, seems somewhat "Adrian Monk" (wikipedia, if you
don't know).


> 
> - Pixel sizes should be banned, as well as hard-coded font sizes.
> These tie you to assumptions about specific user screen dimensions,
> which are almost always wrong. In this day and age, the only real
> solution is a fully dynamically adaptive layout. Everything else is
> just a relic from paper layouts, and is a dead-end.

Yea. Admittedly, I do occasionally use pixels for a little bit of
spacing here and there (never for more than 8px), but I can happily
give them up - especially with so much now using those ultra-high pixel
density screens. Pixels just don't make much sense now unless you're
already dealing on a raster level anyway, like a photo or something.


> Things like
> aligning images should be based on treating image size as an actual
> quantity you can compute sizes on; any hard-coded image sizes is
> bound to cause problems when the image is modified.
> 
> - Unable to express simple computations on sizes, requiring
>   circumlocutions that make the CSS hard to read and maintain.

Yes! That's one of my big issues with CSS, the inability to do anything
computationally. And yea, dealing with images tends to make that become
more of an issue.

Ultimately, the root problem here regarding the lack of computability,
is that HTML/CSS is not, and never has been, a UI layout format (No
matter how much people insist on treating it as
such...*cough*mozilla*cough*.) It's a *document* format. Always has
been. Everything else is a kludge, and is doomed to be so from the
start.


> 
> > >If someone expands their browser to be two-feet wide and ends up
> > >with too much text per line, then really they have no one to blame
> > >but their own dumbass self.
> > 
> > This is a frequent argument. The issue with it is that often people
> > use tabbed browsing, each tab having a page with its own approach to
> > readability.
> 
> The *real* problem is that webpage layout is still very much confined
> by outdated paper layout concepts. The browser should be able to
> automatically columnize text to fit the screen. Maybe with horizontal
> scrolling instead of vertical scrolling. Layouts should be flexible
> enough that the browser can resize the fonts to keep the text
> readable. Seriously, this isn't 1970. There's no reason why we should
> still be fiddling with this stuff manually. Layouts should be
> automatic, not hardcoded or at the whims of designers fixated on
> paper layout concepts.
> 

Exactly. In fact, we *already* had all this. It was called HTML 1. But
then some jackass designers  came in from the print world and demanded
webpages match their photoshop mockups to the pixel, thus HTML mutated
into the world's worst UI layout system. (Of course I skipped a few
steps there, but you get the picture.)

If we weren't trying to force app UIs and manual page layouts into web
pages, we could have *already* had nice document layout systems
tailored to the individual user (with tabbed browsing *not* being an
obstacle to basic window resizing, and with multiple device form
factors *never* being an issue for any content creator), instead of
this current endless circle where W3C occasionally hands out some new
half-baked CSS gimmick that a few of the more overzealous designers can
optionally employ in order to force a one-size-fits-all approach to
"readability" onto everyone who visits that one particular site, thus
leading to inevitable problems and ultimately the W3C's next round of
half-baked hacks to the CSS spec.


> 
> [...]
> > >I *really* wish PDF would die. It's great for printed stuff, but
> > >its mere existence just does far more harm than good. Designers are
> > >already far too tempted to treat computers like a freaking sheet of
> > >paper - PDF just clinches it for them.
> > 
> > Clearly PDF and other fixed-format products are targeted at putting
> > ink on paper, and that's going the way of the dinosaur. At the same
> > time, the publishing industry is very much in turmoil for the time
> > being and only future will tell what the right replacement is.
> [...]
> 
> The right replacement is to have dynamic page layout that doesn't
> depend on CSS hacks or other arbitrary decisions by the publisher
> like number of columns, etc.. This isn't the age of paper anymore;
> layout should be done automatically by the end-user's browser, not by
> content producers, who should be worrying about the content, not the
> layout.
> 

Exactly. In other words, the right solution is more or less equivalent
to HTML 1 or 2.

They already had it pretty much right back in the 90's. But then people
wanted their "dancing pigs" so to speak, and we ended up with this
unholy mutant we have know: HTML 5. World's worst UI format, and no
longer a good document format either.

...And yet 9 times out of 10 it *still* ends up far more readable
on-screen than an 8.5" x 11" two-column PDF. Go figure.


> 
> On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 04:47:09PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> > On 8/11/2013 4:33 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> [...]
> > Currently ereaders are great for reading novels and such with little
> > typography needs. But they're terrible for textbooks and reference
> > material, mainly because the screen is both low res and is way too
> > small.
> > 
> > It's like programming with an 80*24 display (I can't believe I was
> > able to use them!).
> [...]
> 
> I still program with 80*24 displays. Well, more like 80*40, but I find
> that it's actually far more readable than the common obsession with
> squint-inducing microscopic fonts trying to cram as much on the screen
> as possible. Having too many characters per line quickly gets very
> hard to read.
> 

Heck, I started out on the 40-character-width AppleSoft BASIC. Although
I'm sure other people can best me on that (altair, punch cards, etc). 



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