Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvaun | Hacker News Reader

I found the linked article "Axiomatic CSS and Lobotomized Owls" to be a decent read. I'm surprised that it hasn't been highly upvoted in the past despite having many submissions to HN.

Article: https://alistapart.com/article/axiomatic-css-and-lobotomized...

Prev. submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

View on HN

While "Axiomatic CSS" per se has (unfortunately) not quite (yet?) gone mainstream, its origins -- see https://every-layout.dev -- are a profoundly excellent resource, and have been highly influential.

I was trying to figure out what font they are using and when I was inspecting the page I found the comment below. I have nothing in particular to say about it. I just thought it was interesting.

  <!--
                                ...
             s,                .                    .s
              ss,              . ..               .ss
              'SsSs,           ..  .           .sSsS'
               sSs'sSs,        .   .        .sSs'sSs
                sSs  'sSs,      ...      .sSs'  sSs
                 sS,    'sSs,         .sSs'    .Ss
                 'Ss       'sSs,   .sSs'       sS'
        ...       sSs         ' .sSs'         sSs       ...
       .           sSs       .sSs' ..,       sSs       .
       . ..         sS,   .sSs'  .  'sSs,   .Ss        . ..
       ..  .        'Ss .Ss'     .     'sSs. ''        ..  .
       .   .         sSs '       .        'sSs,        .   .
        ...      .sS.'sSs        .        .. 'sSs,      ...
              .sSs'    sS,     .....     .Ss    'sSs,
           .sSs'       'Ss       .       sS'       'sSs,
        .sSs'           sSs      .      sSs           'sSs,
     .sSs'____________________________ sSs ______________'sSs,
  .sSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS'.Ss SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSs,
                          ...         sS'
                           sSs       sSs
                            sSs     sSs
                             sS,   .Ss
                             'Ss   sS'
                              sSs sSs
                               sSsSs
                                sSs
                                 s
  
                       YOU ARE YOUR OWN GOD.
               YOU HAVE THE POWER TO CHANGE THE WORLD.
                       MAKE THE MOST OF IT.
    -->

Pretty sure that is from the church of satan. Which is not about worshiping satan but more humanist / atheist / there is no god but you should still be a force for good.

It's just that their imagery is intentionally quite jarring to christians. To quote the satanists. It is not them who believe in Satan, its the christians who believe in Satan.

As a European, I find it quite amusing that religion is so central to american culture, that they even figured out a way to make a christian version of atheism.

As a fellow European, I feel we have nothing to be amused about. What the church thinks still has excessive weight in lawmaking and people's opinions. Publicly funded schools have "religion" classes where the local mainstream christianity variant is the main content. And the tax authority is still tasked with collecting the "church tax".

As former resident of several European countries, I find your statement, while not entirely incorrect, a bit too "blanketing".

All this may be quite dependent on where you live (the mention of the "church tax" makes me suppose Germany, as they have a Kirchensteuer, but I'm sure other countries must have a similar tax). In any case, there are European countries without church tax, beyond normal taxes that could be used for preservation of historical sites, religious or otherwise (which I agree may be somewhat biased in what religious sites can pretend to be considered historical).

Similarly, many countries do not have "religion" classes in "publicly funded schools", especially in countries that are (supposedly or admittedly) laic. That being said, there's also often a bias there as a lot of holidays are tied to religion and Christianity in particular, and it'd be quite common to explain in class the origin and nature of these holidays. I'd hardly think it counts as "religion" class, though, but that'd depend on what the teachers do.

In Germany, I was pleasantly surprised that some parties up for election have (regionally) expressed the will to abolish relgion-based studies in public schools. It makes me a bit hopeful, especially since I recently got the impression that young people are skewing more religious again. I have also seen some proposals to abolish the laws currently prohibiting singing and dancing during certain religious holidays.

I think in Germany this is really crying out of boredom. If you want to, you don't have to come in contact with any of it. It was still relevant 30-40 years ago, but not today. Not in any relevant capacity.

Other european countries are more laical or secular, but that is pretty much just flavor today.

Some eastern countries are more involved, but if you propose the church having relevant influence in central or western Europe, you really slept the last two decades.

... and religious figures are still invited to discussion about the ethics of voluntary euthanasia. What gives?

You are right, we Europeans still have more we need to do before we are truly secular.

But, I still find this funny.

How so? Religion is still central in many countries in Europe, eg Croatia, Poland, etc. It's even getting stronger as the populace is leaning more to the right every day. Plenty of religious people in the media here raving against covid vaccines etc.

You're definitely right technically.

The problem is that Europe is split up into dozens of countries with very somewhat different values and cultures, so whenever you say "In Europe X happens", then you can always invoke some version of your argument.

Europe is France, Netherlands, Albania, Moldova. All of these are very different in various statistics.

You can say the same thing about the US. The cultural values of Massachusetts are radically different from the cultural values of Mississippi.

To some degree yes, but mainstream US is still far more culturally uniform from state to state than Europe's countries are. In Europe most of countries are nation-based and as such encapsulate also all the possible differences in ethnicities, languages, culture, religion and history to a much higher degree. Imagine each race/denomination/ethical group in US having their own independent state with their own laws and ways of life, and you get something like Europe.

But there is still a common language in the us. And national TV-networks with lots of viewers in both those states.

Neither of those are true for Europe.

I would argue that it is fair to say that the US is more homogeneous than Europe, especially if you are talking about the entire Europe, and not just the EU.

I have never been to Croatia or Poland, but of course you are right in that there are European countries where religion has a more central role than in other European countries.

But, how common is it really in Croatia or Poland to use christian terms such as "satanist" when you want to say that you are an atheist?

There was an important piece left out of the description of the Church of Satan: it is typically used as a device to test civil liberties and separation of church and state.

If, say, a courthouse has a statue of a religious theme, then by the law of the land, the courthouse must be willing to erect a statue for any religion. Like, say, a statue of Baphomet. Or they can remove _all_ of the religious iconography. That demographics are mostly Christian and so such things are overtly offensive makes it more effective.

So, atheists or agnostics or even people of more orthodox religious persuasion are using the Church of Satan as a vehicle of representation for a strong stance on the separation of church and state.

> christian terms such as "satanist"

in Croatia at least, they use the term "communist" or "child of a yugoslav officer" to slander atheists or secularists.

>It's just that their imagery is intentionally quite jarring to christians. To quote the satanists. It is not them who believe in Satan, its the christians who believe in Satan.

Seems anti-social, especially when injected into a non-religious context like a site about web design.

That site is black on white¹, and has no other colors, images, fancy borders, nor any other obvious “design”—and yet it is remarkably pleasant to look at, even beautiful. The site sells the authors’ ideas; they obviously know something. (Plus no doorslams, cookie warnings, or other annoyances. And an RSS feed.)

[1] Really very dark grey on very light grey.

"and yet"? It's "and therefore".

† The only problem is that the atrocious #fafafa on #050505 is made a whole lot worse because there aren't a bunch of even worse things distracting you from it.

Okay, I'll bite. Why is #050505 on #FAFAFA (not the reverse, as you stated) "atrocious"? Are we playing the "anything less than #000000 on #FFFFFF is grey text on a grey background and entirely unreadable" card?

I don't understand their complaint either. Some people have a hard time with absolute black on absolute white (and/or vice versa) so easing up a little can be helpful. It's a small difference, 19:52:1 vs. 21:1 contrast ratio. I've seen advice to avoid exceeding 18:1 in large areas, maybe #111 on #f9f9f9.

We tend to focus only on the accessibility issues caused by low contrast, but very high contrast also makes reading more difficult, especially for people with dyslexia -- and it's also more likely to cause eye strain if it's a full-length article.

At any rate, "it's okay for text not to be pure black and backgrounds not to be pure white" has become my tiny hill to die on.

Maybe browsers should go back to using a gray background by default, but less gray than one Mosaic and the other used.

How do you calculate the contrast ratio?

I use the WebAIM contrast checker:

https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

It's basically a measure of perceived brightness. The actual formula involves calculating the relative luminance of the background and foreground colors, where luminance is a value from 0 (darkest) to 1 (lightest), and using the formula

(lighter_luminance + 0.05) / (darker_luminance + 0.05)

So the highest possible contrast ratio in this system is 21:1.

I see, thank you.

The WebAIM contrast checker web page is one of many. It's nice because the colors have lightness sliders so one can quickly try alternatives then copy the hex values into your CSS.

I like checking with Lea Verou's https://contrast-ratio.com because it can check colors written in many different formats, not just hex. Also, it can do +/- contrast ranges when colors include the alpha channel.

In the Chrome and Firefox DevTools, you often can simply click the color swatch for the `color` property. The pop-up includes the contrast number vs. the background-color for that text and whether or not it meets a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) contrast criteria (Level AA if it's 4.5 or above for regular-sized text, Level AAA if its 7 or above for regular-sized text).

What a neat resource. Thanks for sharing!

thanks for the site link, did not have that as a entry on the resource list myself :)

I didn’t really understand why the sibling selector was introduced as a scoped version of the lobotomised owl, as if that was the canonical implementation. The sibling selector has always been underrated.

It's an excellent article. I share it with people constantly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com