HTML-Ipsum

html-ipsum.com

33 points·jwilliams··8 comments

This is my standard source:

I use this usually with English, Greek, Russian, Arabic and Chinese text. This makes me fix up most character encoding issues at the earliest possible opportunity in a project.

This maybe overkill for a lot of development, but most of the sites I have worked on in the past two years have been in 14+ languages.

Do you know enough about this generator to trust the text generated in other languages? For all you know, the Arabic or Hebrew ones might be embedding culturally insensitive words if they were "translated" from the original gibberish lorem ipsum. Or do other scripts have a pseudo-canonical passage to quote from like De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum?

Thank you. I can't even remember how often I copied the lorem-ipsum into my source code and marked the paragraphs up with <p>-tags. This will save me some time (and frustration).

Now that's a great idea.

One of recommendations from good web designers I've heard is to use actual content for drafts. If actual content is not available, write something that seems like an actual content.

That is the opposite of the practice used in the print world - where lorem ipsum comes from. The rationale is that the semantic meaning of the words can bias design decisions. This sequence of "words" has the same distribution of letters as English, yet means nothing.

What is the rationale from the web designers you've spoken to?

I might have misremembered the advice. Maybe they were talking about not using it on web sites intended to be in other languages (I mean, Cyrillic, etc).

If you like this, you might also like http://tabularasa.org/

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