A History of Punctuation for the Internet Age

"Students--please don't use clichés in your writing."

"Funnel your paragraphs."

"Students--just don't use clichés ever! Why use them? Even among yourselfs?"

"And don't use acronyms, unless your writing a technical paper, and it's absolutely necessary to the paper! Please?"

I just remembered his name--Dr. Roland? I was waiting for my girlfriend, and overheard his wishes while sitting on the floor outside his class. I could tell he was tired. I can still smell the carpet cleaner.

Centuries of progress to make text readable, and internet are decades of regression:

- slow disappearance of "non easily typable" stuff. Ex: Ê œ (ligatures/and weired stuff) that do have sense;

- unreadable text due to inconsistent spacing (quadratin spaces are underused, and hyphenation sux), and the "justification" on web browser is a shame;

- poor fonts;

- too large/narrow columns of text, scrolling is unpleasant to the brain;

- web pages often don't scale relatively to the fonts size making zoom degrade the text;

- the vibration of a screen is really tiring much more than paper for reading (add the ads, the blink bzoom of custom js effects or the distractions)

Typography is a lots of simple rules. When applied they make text more readable. TeX does automatized typography in an awesome way.

Why are modern developers unable to port the greatness of automated typography to web browsers? Because, well readability does not count, you don't make money of people reading.

Regarding typography its lack in modern browsers is pissing me off.

Btw, yes every country/region have special rules for typography/hyphenation so compared to unicode it is even harder to make a standard. Typography should be dynamically applied at the view level based on the context.

Typography should be modifiable. Because well, else we cannot represent Guillaume Appolinaire nicely typographed poetry. Because typography is also part of the expression and people have the right to have choices.

We are in 2015.

Computer are doing a very poor job for the most important vector of human dialog: presenting text in a way that can be easily read.

And I forgot: if you ever read the books made with fonts of the "Imprimerie Nationale": our fonts are sucking bigs.

They are ugly, the small size are unreadable, the italic/bold are horrible, the different size should not be always obtained by homothetia, all the letters should not be exactly aligned on the bottom line ....

Computers could be better. But we prefer invest in HTTP2/0 to bring you more securely 15Mb of advertisements while reading 1000 characters.