2021-01-15

Content vs. Presentation -- Re: Gemini Typography

#grumpy

#smolnet

#keepitsimple

Sandra writes:

Gemini finally solved the semantic vs presentation problem.

gemini://idiomdrottning.org/gemini-typography/

local copy

in reply to the discussion mentioned in Alex' "Gemini is Useless" post.

gemini://alex.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-01-08-useless.gmi

local copy

It took a while for me to realize, how much actually I adhere to this principle.

This week I got reminded of this again. Email. For me email is the first digital communication form I got exposed to. And I have stuck to email for most of my digital communication ever since.

Email had the same separation between content and its presentation. I say "had", because at day job marketing had their say about corporate identity with respect to email. This means, I cannot send emails in plain text, Arial font and rich text format they shall be. Corporate identity imposes their ideas on me. Sorry, folks, but this makes me very grumpy very fast: I cannot read "Arial" font for anything longer than three lines without my pattern recognition getting dizzy and my eyes starting to hurt. Could I have a monospace font like 'terminus' or similar, please? Everywhere? Without asking for permission? I might prefer bold font or larger line spacing --- in the end its /my/ eyes, which start to hurt, not yours. Short answer from the poor soul at IT support: "No". Sigh. His longer answer at least expressed knowledge of why I would be asking in the first place. And something about /young people/ lacking understanding of the significance of 80x24 and plain text. :)

tl;dr:

Per design email does not impose the authors ideas of layout or fonts (aka. presentation) on the readers eyes. This is one of its most convincing features. The same can be said about GemText.

Cheers,

~ew

[a] BITNET (wikipedia)

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