World's worst blog design strikes again with its mandatory Javascript and annoying layout. Here is a static copy: https://archive.today/uvbua
I don't mean to pick on you personally, or just on this one comment. (Your second sentence alone, by the way, would have been a helpful contribution.) The problem is the tedious stampedes such comments spawn.
Maybe a "offtopic" or "noise" flag could be used for punishing comments like this (similarly to random comments that praise a submission without adding anything) so they float down but not into the grey negative score area?
Then open the file in your browser of choice.
Here is one quick dirty way using only shell, sed, nc and the openssl binary:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367156
Example:
Copy and paste the script into a file and save as some filename.
Then
filename adrianchadd > f.html
browsername f.html
Mandatory JavaScript delenda est!
You don't need JS to display HTML text. Browsers have had that ability since Berners-Lee.
(I get the feeling I am missing something obvious.)
Another thing is that, actually, design has come a long way and many modern websites look way better than many older books.
Edit: Yep, totally forgot about hyphenation. I guess I haven't seen hyphenated text in a long time, as everything in web is unhyphenated.
You'd fall over if you saw the subtlety of the tools and the amount of effort that goes in to typesetting a book with justified body text. It is not at all unusual for a publisher to employ staff specifically for the task of typesetting. In the final stages of book production, the typesetters are assigned sections of the book after all edits are complete (ha! in a perfect world), at which point they meticulously review each page of text, often manually inserting/removing hyphenation, until the text is laid out correctly.
Care to venture a guess at the number of bloggers who do the same when using 'text-align: justify'?
You can fit more characters per line in a justified layout.
> It's done to look good, and succeeds. But it requires work to do right.
Absolutely, but well executed left-alignment can also look good, and in a format where you don't necessarily have control over the size of the page and the time to properly justify the text it should be preferred. IMO, left-alignment beats poorly justified text every time.
no you can't
editing to be a bit more descriptive: Here's an example: http://i.stack.imgur.com/ahM5C.png
With hyphenation and acceptable kerning, the justified text has more characters per line.
Ummm, justification is about adding space to spread a line out: it's impossible to fit more text on a line that way.
Kerning is about removing space. It's related to by independent of justification. A well-laid-out work will do both.
> Absolutely, but well executed left-alignment can also look good
Meh. For printed material I think it's worth the effort to justify.
> in a format where you don't necessarily have control over the size of the page and the time to properly justify the text it should be preferred. IMO, left-alignment beats poorly justified text every time.
No argument there.
Basically, in a well-typeset book, nearly every line break is a manually selected hard break rather than an automatically generated soft wrap.