What color is your markup? | Hacker News Reader

What color is your markup?

t-ravis.com

25 pointsctrlmeta12 comments

This has a really interesting point, that's being overwhelmed with weird color stuff that I frankly don't understand at all.

The point is about a marked-up document's concept of 'itself as a document', and how this rarely matches to an HTML document, which is a container for the document as well as a bunch of not-document things (navigation header) and para-document things (section sidebar, preview embeds and popups).

I think all of the color stuff is meant to illustrate (or should I say, ink) the bad design revealed by this disparity. I didn't actually get it, but I've always been a <b>bold</b> sort of person, <strong>strong</strong> just seems like another way to say the same thing, which caught on as a fad.

But HTML having markup for documents inside of documents? Strikes me as a good idea. What I don't know is if that's blue or chartreuse.

The "color stuff" is most certainly a reference to this:

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...

Both of which may or may not have some connection to the book What Color is Your Parachute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Color_Is_Your_Parachute....

ngl i thought it was an andrew tate joke for a hot second there, took me a little longer to remember the what color are your bits post.

Great content and, ironically, I couldn't quite make it through due to readability fatigue of knockout white text on black background.

A significant factor in the fatigue is probably also the use of a monospace font; in such cases I almost always switch it to a serif and breathe a sigh of relief.

But when you complain of white on black, I say it could be worse: for me it was true-black on light-black, because I have JavaScript disabled and in that case the content is placed in a curious malformed <noscript> tag (you can’t put attributes on a noscript tag, it’s basically a special instruction for the HTML parser that disappears at parse time) and the stylesheet is poorly done.

I think the dense line-spacing and mono-spaced font is a bigger problem.

The site is fashioned like a MUD being played in a terminal. At the very bottom is a prompt where you can enter commands to "look" around, get help, go to other pages, etc.

They describe three types of markup.

Seems kinda arbitrary, but a curious line of thought - I enjoyed the article. It made me imagine a new kind of hypertext, an evolution of HTML that unifies all these realms and more as a universal templating language. One can dream!

> Red markup describes how to present something. One way to spot presentational markup is that it usually doesn't make sense if you imagine changing from one media to another (if it's a print/web document, imagine translating it into an audio recording).

> Yellow markup describes the structure of the document itself. To spot structural markup, replace the content (or compare multiple documents in the same format) and see what labels are stable. You can also imagine porting the content to another format (article, book, slide show, and so on) and consider what would break.

> Blue markup describes the ontology of things that appear in the content--it names and categorizes them.

Then they introduce purple, magenta, green, chartreuse, ... proving that their own classification doesn't actually hold up. At this point I got confused about what their point was (or maybe they did?)

The article that is the inspiration for the title here is worth reading. https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-... It's been mentioned on HN before.

ngl first time i read that title i couldn't figure out if it was a reference to matthew skala or andrew tate

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