california-og

Related, there's also stone paper: https://stone-paper.nl/en/

Thank you! These are good ideas, will implement for the next iteration.

That's a great idea! Don't know how I didn't think of that. But you can upload your own fonts too as long as they are 1bit black and white.

Did you try counter()? There's also the upcoming sibling-index()

For more, read Paul Nash's "The abandoning of the long s in Britain in 1800", which mentions the material and economic aspects, but then digs deeper into why it happened so suddenly in 1800 (which he speculates is realted to the Act).

It's more of a pet theory I have. The 1787 Printer's grammar mentions the following:

"Kerned Letters being attended with more trouble than other Sorts, Founders are sometimes sparing in casting them; whereas they rather require a larger number than their Casting-Bill specifies; considering the chance which Kerned Letters stand, to have their Beaks broke, especially the Roman f, when it stands at the end of a line, where it is exposed to other accidents, besides those from the lye-brush: but in still more danger are Kerned Letters of the Italic; especially d f l, when they stand, with their Beaks unguarded, at the end of lines; and at the beginning of lines, f g j [long s] y run a great hazard; though of these, f and [long s] in particular are most liable to suffer."[0]

So, foundries are less likely to cast letters that break easily. This is just 4 years before Bell dropped the long s, so while the other reasons outlined in the Wikipedia are probably the main reasons, I speculate that it was also an economic decision based on them breaking quite easily. Especially when the new "modern" look required ever sharper and finer details.

And my point was that it is (partly) this material aspect of typography that contributed to the disappearance of a whole letter from English written language. Doesn't really matter if it's hundreds of years after the "invention" of printing press, it's still related to it.

0: https://archive.org/details/b2876058x/page/41/mode/1up

And long s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

AFAIK it was dropped out because the top hook of the long s punch broke easily, and could be easily replaced with a basic s.

My wish is for a fast SVG renderer in the browser. At the moment, basic vector drawing is fast, but almost any use of filters or effects lags the browser. Theres a lot that SVG could do for (web) UI, but won't because it's so slow. Here's a small thought experiment I made a while ago for using SVG for more unconventional webdesign. Sadly it lags a lot.

https://hlnet.neocities.org/grid-drawings/grid-drawing

I can also highly recommend Enzio Mari's Autoprogettazione furniture. Although slightly more involved in construction, all you need is standard planks, hand saw, a hammer and some nails. The instruction PDF can be found online (chairs in the latter half):

https://syllabus.pirate.care/library/Enzo%20Mari/Autoprogett...

I think this 3-part essay might be relevant to your argument: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/147/623330/society-of-the-psy...

That's probably what should happen, but it's not what happens in reality. In grading I have to follow a very detailed grading matrix (made by some higher-ups) and the requirements for passing and getting the lowest grade are so incredibly low that it's almost impossible to fail, if the text even somewhat resembles a thesis. The only way I could fail a student, is if they cheated, plagiarised or fabricated stuff.

The person who used the AI slop blog for sources, we asked them to just remove them and resubmit. The person who hallucinated sources is however getting investigated for fabrication. But this is an incredibly long process to go through, which takes away time and energy from actual teaching / research / course prep. Most of the faculty is already overworked and on the verge of burnout (or are recovering post-burnout), so everybody tries to avoid it if they can. Besides, playing a cop is not what anybody wants to do, and its not what teaching should be about, as the original blog post mentioned. IF the University as an institution had some standards and actually valued education, it could be different. But it's not. The University only cares about some imaginary metrics, like international rankings and money. A few years ago they built a multi-million datacenter just for gathering data from everything that happens in the University, so they could make more convincing presentations for the ministry of education — to get more money and to "prove" that the money had a measurable impact. The University is a student-factory (this is a direct quote by a previous principal).

I totally agree. I think the neo-liberal university model is the real culprit. Where I live, Universities get money for each student who graduates. This is up to 100k euros for a new doctorate. This means that the University and its admin want as many students to graduate as possible. The (BA&MA) students also want to graduate in target time: if they do, they get a huge part of their student loans forgiven.

What has AI done? I teach a BA thesis seminar. Last year, when AI wasn't used as much, around 30% of the students failed to turn in their BA thesises. 30% drop-out rate was normal. This year: only 5% dropped out, while the amount of ChatGPT generated text has skyrocketed. I think there is a correlation: ChatGPT helps students write their thesises, so they're not as likely to drop out.

The University and the admins are probably very happy that so many students are graduating. But also, some colleagues are seeing an upside to this: if more graduate, the University gets more money, which means less cuts to teaching budgets, which means that the teachers can actually do their job and improve their courses, for those students who are actually there to learn. But personally, as a teacher, I'm at loss of what to do. Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal University should be? Nobody else seems to care. Or should I pass them, let them graduate, and reserve my energy to teach those who are motivated and are willing to engage?

Check out GodSVG for a promising (still in development) SVG code editor.

https://www.godsvg.com/

I did consider that, but the 1980 IBM Displaywriter uses a filled downwards triangle, not a house character, to indicate the center line [0].

But you're right that the Displaywriter inspited 1984 DisplayWrite DOS program [1] did use the house character for the same purpose. (Although, CP437 also included a filled downwards triangle character at 0x1F.)

[0]: https://youtu.be/YnU_woucebE?t=169

[1]: https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Software/ibm_displaywrite.p...

(Author here) Yep, I also wrote another article digging into the history of the checkered box character:

https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/the-origins-of-del-0x7f-and-i...

The last one was a gotcha: it's their newly established York–London flight!

Try Our New York–London Flight Connection.

Or if it was New York:

Try Our New York – London Flight Connection.

Note the additional spaces. Agree on the capitalization though.

Here's some examples where the en dash could make things more clear:

-5--2°C

post-war-pre-digital era

See sections 10-O-15-Q

Try Our New York-London Flight Connection!

I highly recommend reading this paper^[0] on permacomputing. It explains the concept in depth.

> In this paper, we argue for the potential of permacomputing as a rich framework for exploring creative design constraints building on a long history of applying constraints in art, design and cultural practices.

[0]: https://monoskop.org/images/6/6a/Mansoux_Aymeric_et_al_2023_...

Olia Lialinas "My boyfriend came back from the war" is a classic piece of netart that uses frameset in a unique way. It's still online:

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/war2.htm

Fonts are kind of dumb. There's usually nothing actually weird going on. Ligatures are simple character substitutions. What the LIGSPACE is, most likely, is a spacing character added by the designer to align the characters in the ligature correctly. So, the LIGSPACE is just a character like any other and is nothing special. For example, when you hit a space bar, you are inserting a character which doesn't render anything because the designer didn't draw anything there. There's no extra logic.

What do you mean? Add far as I know <code><pre> doesn't help with any of those?

Color is very much a part of ASCII art, if we consider ASCII to mean a broader range of different technologies. Just check the stuff in the article, or the stuff on https://16colo.rs/ site.

Check my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42572483

For whitespace and for the simplest ASCII sure, but for anything a bit more complex you might have problems with

1. HTML reserved characters like < > and \.

2. overflowing content

3. displaying ASCII made with special encodings and characters sets, like code page 437

4. displaying nonprintable (control) characters

5. displaying colors

6. text preprocessors messing up the formatting

It's not trivial to display ASCII art as text in html. There's so many ways to mess it up that unless the site is dedicated to ASCII art, a simple image is really preferable.

I wish the article mentioned Computer Nude (1967) by Ken Knowlton. It isn't ASCII, but it is a text mosaic. It was widely circulated at the time, was the first full frontal nude printed in The New York Times, and was somewhat important in the development of computer graphics.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/technology/ken-knowlton-d...

It's JavaScript for the interactive/reactive parts, but the notebook is implemented in a self-contained HTML file: it handles everything from document structure to editing and display. It's also not dependant on 3rd party software (par browser), and is as durable, portable and easy-to-use as any HTML is.

Also: https://www.programmingfonts.org/

Thanks for sharing! This was a great read.

There's a lot of sites between pure html and modern css. "Simply" rendering things differently would definitely break a lot of sites. Just imagine if browsers started defaulting to *{box-sizing: border-box;}.

Your solution is quite nice and probably as simple as site generators get, but I was thinking of using php just for some simple includes etc. Here's my inspiration post which explains what I'm after, and why generators in general are not the solution (for me): http://ankarstrom.se/~john/articles/html2/