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~inquiry

> I’m of two minds about this. I’m definitely in favor
> of simplicity, but that’s not the same in my view as
> *nothing*. It’s important not to throw out the baby with
> the bathwater, in other words.

Seems to me this species throws babies out with the amniotic fluid all the time. But that's a different topic.... <coughs nervously>

As for "the more of the onus you put on your user/read to fix things", I've long considered attempting to address the (mathematical) product of peoples' tastes and varying/emerging devices/browsers a fools errand. I could see feeling more responsibility toward that were I providing "Truth" or some shared public resource, but as for a blog, I feel my responsibility ends with the text, because it's providing the one thing others can't come by other than by mind reading: my thoughts. How it looks? Well, anyone who needs it to be formatted a certain way is free to learn how to do that. If that certain way is a show stopper, and they're not willing to make the effort to learn and apply that learning to the text, oh well.

I'm honestly to the point where I wish people were mostly doing something closer to what I've presented: try to provide good content that's *parse-able* for being regular. The more easily parsed, the more others can do with it to their heart's content. It's when the content is mired in gobs of presentation that the reader is hampered, if you ask me - especially given the kind of for-shit html that browsers find a way to render out of a sort of desperation.

As for "accessibility", again, this is merely blogging, not "Truth" or a public service that shouldn't be excluding some. But when it comes to presenting personal thoughts, ease on my end trumps who can decipher it. Per my little parsing rant, I believe I'm making my thoughts accessible to considerably more processing/manipulation/formatting than is someone struggling with layers upon layers of containers for the sake of whizbang visual effects.

> For example, on a 4K screen (like I’m using now), I
> generally find un-formatted text to render too small. It
> also adds extra work to follow links that aren’t rendered
> as such (even if it’s not very much).

Again, my attitude is that if it's too much, then first of all you're won't be missing much, and second of all it wouldn't be the first time that someone missed out on something for not making a little effort. :-)

At what point does making it easier to ride a two-wheeled bike render the activity not really riding a bike? It becomes that kind of ridiculous at a certain point.

> The text size/display issue you mention says to me that
> you hadn’t quite found the best rule(s) to use, up to
> and including what units of measurement you were using.

My text was paragraphs within a single <div> styled to this paltry degree:

div {

max-width: 600px;

}

Like I said in the original post, all the pages included that style sheet via a <link> element in the <head>, and all of them except one behaved identically. That one aberration was coded identically to the others, and I know that both from some semi-exhaustive staring, and from whittling it and a page that rendered as expected down to "diff'able essentials".

And, I mean, the difference was startling. Where as the "correct" pages resized the same, and text-wrapped the same with identical font sizes, the "bad" page displayed with a much smaller font size, and line wrapping didn't happen at all when I minimized the window... it was just cut off at the right window boundary.

I know, I know... it *had* to be something I was doing wrong. But I spent a couple hours trying to figure it out, and part of my deciding my html days were over is that I had to waste that kind of time dicking with such in the first place when the text content itself was far more important.

> I don’t want to sound hyper-critical or anything;
> obviously you do you for your own space.

We're good. Your thoughts helped me clarify mine. Thank you!

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~zampano wrote (thread):

I appreciate your thoughts, and as you mention, my reply was as much (or more) about clarifying my own views as responding to yours.

Some of my thinking honestly comes from worry that if I make the barrier to entry too high for something I create, fewer people will engage with it. But this is much more about my own fears than any kind of “best practices” for coding. I’ve long struggled with blogging as on the one hand I love doing it, but on the other it’s easy for me to wonder “what’s the point?” if I don’t get a lot of engagement. I think it’s less about there being some ideal way to approach blogging and more just recognizing where I’m at in my life right now.

HTML standards have, believe it or not, gotten *much* better in the past 10+ years. I’ve worked with HTML (off and on) since the mid-1990s, and it used to be so much worse. Internet Explorer especially simply refused to follow any kind of standards, so you would basically have to do two separate pages to get any kind of consistency. As much as I hate Google’s monopoly via Chrome/Chromium, at least they generally keep things standards-compliant (as does Firefox).

Do you plan on mirroring your blog content here? Just wondering where the simplest place to read will be :)