Full Text Justification is Abysmal
I hate full text justification. It works ok for newspapers since their columns are not wide, and they typically do not use "big words". So, the difference from line to line between letters and words aren't noticeable. Also TeX and LaTeX seem to get it right, but that's because TeX and family obey typesetting rules that have been carefully tweaked, honed, and perfected over the past 500 years.
But then came WYSIWYG, and everyone from "HTML Programmer" (snort) through administrative assitant through CEO thinks they suddenly have insight into what looks better. And just add insult to injury, we get 1680x1050 resolution monitors with ClearType font smoothing and...
it looks like I printed it on my 9 pin Epson dot matrix from 20 years ago.
The problem is especially bad on technical blogs and Wikis since we techies DO use really big words; not because we're that smart (although some are, just not me), but because we tend to talk in code, and our code uses big words, or directories, or class names, or, or or... The result is certainly not unreadable, but very sophomoric in impression.
If you have a blog or run a wiki and can control these things, don't use full text justification. Yeah, it was cool in 8'th grade with Scripsit to see the blinkenlights magically put text to paper and spread it out to the edge, but these days it just looks like an 8'th grader wrote it. Using Scripsit.
(I'm not a Luddite, really.)
posted by Michael Campbell @ 5:26 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Hey,I've run into the same problems with text justification, too. Left seems the best way to go.
PS I read about your twitter regarding my scala bigotry. Just for the record, twitter did incorporate scala into it's infrastructure. I met Blaine Cook at SxSW during his scalability talk. It's interesting how the moment he left the company, twitter started to really fail. I feel that management threw technologies at the problem, e.g. Scala, instead of asking, "How do we scale the architecture?" Remember, languages don't scale, architectures do.
Please think twice before throwing out the word "bigotry."
Cheers,
Barce
barce,
Thanks for the comment. While I respect your right to an opinion, I used the word "bigotry" in no offensive manner, and if you WERE offended by it, well, so it goes.
I have no vested interest nor knowledge of twitter's existing architecture, although I do believe it is Rails, right? Honestly, I couldn't care less if they keep it or dump it as long as it works.
My comment using twitter was predicated by the fact that you badmouthed Scala (and it should be obvious that I know less about Scala than I should), NOT whatever architecture may or may not have been used or built with it, and then suggested as an improvement, Erlang which is...a language, which seems rather at odds with your "Remember..." wisdom.
Yes, I know about OTP and all the wonderfulness around it, and I would agree 100% with you that twitter would probably do MUCH better with it than they are now. But that's not what you said. If that's what you meant, then yes, wholehearted agreement.
As for Blaine; again I have zero knowledge of timing or anything here, but are your conclusions supported by facts? DID the management, in fact, throw technologies at the problem? What about volume; what has /it/ done since Blaine left? If it's been flat, then yes, perhaps there's something there. But if it has grown, as I suspect it has, then maybe Blaine's leadership would have done nothing. Or, maybe it would have. We just don't know.
From the twitter blogs I've been reading, it seems they're having much more problems with databases than anything, and given what twitter does, that seems reasonable. I would say that the ORM layer of Rails isn't any speed demon, but that doesn't matter much if your db's not up anyway. I don't know that ANY software architecture stack can help that. Maybe a good DBA.
Coming to my blog and leaving the slimmest of on-topic comments to gripe about some twitter beef is rather ... weak, though, wouldn't you agree?
Thanks again for your comment.
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