Sometime in the next few hours I’m updating the ongoing software (oh yes, please do let me know if it breaks). New frontiers in reckless typographic abandon! Plus, pushing the boundaries of static web serving technology till they bleed! Plus, we’re working with Zeldman!
First of all, if the serifed font on this page is making your eyes bleed, (let me guess: you’re on pre-XP Windows or a Linux box) please don’t go away! Just click that handy “Sans-Serif” label over there to your left, and the problem will clear up and stay that way.
The New Typographic World Order · The finding is that, while these are matters of taste, serifed typefaces look good even on computer screens with less than 100 dots per inch if you have anti-aliasing. Which in practical terms, means if you have XP or OS X. These days, it’s not that hard to set up multiple stylesheets and support clicking back and forth and make the choice sticky; I stole the code behind those Serif/Sans buttons from Zeldman and changed not a single character, ain’t the Web great? (Oh, by the way, Antarctica has retained Zeldman to help spruce up our design, so for those of you looking at Visual Net, stand by for it to start looking way better.)
That code uses cookies to remember whether you like serif or sans, so if you’re a no-cookies kind of person and you don’t like the default, you’re going to have to change it by hand. For this reason, I’ve made sans-serif the default even though in my authorial (authorized? authoritarian? authentic?) opinion the serif is a better fit. Since Linux and anti-aliasing rarely appear in the same sentence, and since anti-cookietarianism correlates highly with penguinophilia, I thought we could cut those folks some slack. But if you’re on OS X or XP, do try out the Serifed version. One of these years I'm switching the default.
Javascript Doesn’t Have to Suck · If you care at all about these things, you might want to peek at that Javascript, which is refreshing in that it’s actually human-readable, isn’t all run together on one line, and is cleanly structured. Since I’ve learned Javascript via “View Source” (and only via “View Source”) I’d had the impression that the language was required to be ugly, obfuscated, and densificated. This, to be honest, was the first nontrivial Javascript I’d ever tried to use that shows evidence of someone having cared.
If you’re going to put the Javascript in an external file (and if there’s more than a couple of lines, why wouldn’t you?), then it’s only going to get downloaded very rarely, so why not make it nice and easy to read even if it is a bit bigger?
Static Pages or Death! · ongoing essaylets that don’t contain images (like this one) have now been prettified by the addition of a “picture of the day” which appears to your right. Note that the pic-of-the-day changes every few minutes, and links to whatever ongoing piece originally bore it, but the pages are all (tee-hee) still served statically! [Don’t be so smug -Ed.].
