We're a long way from the halcyon days of ASCII-only text

Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text "perfectly". It's all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.

“Text Rendering Hates You [1]”

I don't know if I'm glad or sad I didn't read this article before rendering HTML (HyperText Markup Language) into different [2] formats [3]. On the one hand, it might have completely discouraged me from even starting. On the other hand, I don't use the full span of Unicode characters in my blog posts (which I'm very thankful for, after doing all this work). But on the gripping hand, Lynx [4] was doing a horrible job at formatting HTML into text, and what I have now is much better looking.

So let's see … we now have three hard things in Computer Science:

Yup, that seems about right.

[1] https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/

[2] /boston/2020/07/04.1

[3] /boston/2020/07/16.1

[4] http://lynx.browser.org/

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