licentious radio

Friday, November 29, 2002
[7:41:07 PM]

Sometimes I laugh and call myself "the anti-zeldman". But sheesh.

The throngs of loyal licentious-istas revel in our anti-justification diatribes. Sure enough, the Zeldman has gone over to the dark side, not merely justifying his text, but justifying -- no, extolling -- his justification.

What makes text readable? Even, small space between words. What do you get if you justify but don't hyphenate? Garbage out, with smooth edges.

Here's how you opt out. Get yourself a Mozilla browser. In the subdirectory called "chrome", create a file called "userContent.css". Put the following line in the file:

#primarycontent > * {text-align: left ! important}

Now any tag in the main content area won't be justified.

This is the joy and silliness of user styles.

Yes, if you read a site regularly you can hack its styling. But if a lot of sites you want to read switch to readability-detracting stylings, this will get tedious.

You could also give up completely:

* {text-align: left ! important}

But that's a wretched choice. *Some* designers will use their text-align powers for good.

The fact that I don't want body text justified doesn't mean that I want *everything* left aligned.

Two points for first-time visitors:

1) In books we are on the verge of something wonderful -- with aggressive hyphenation, hanging hyphens, and undetectable variations in letter-spacing, we are about to see a quantum leap in readability of books. Designers more and more are using excellent typefaces. When they catch on about formatting lines of text, it's going to be great.

2) I appreciate ol' J. Zeldman, and I've learned a lot from zeldman.com and alistapart.com. We're just in different tribes. I'm a typography enthusiast, and readability of body text seems like the highest priority for most websites.

[10:52:34 AM]
Schaedler Precision Rules, baby. Paola di Stefano was maybe the first professional graphic designer I worked with (briefly). I was in awe of her precision rules. I couldn't help myself. I went out and bought the pair. Imagine a ruler that goes down to 1/64 of an inch. With one of these, you can eyeball measurements to 1/128 of an inch or better.

I don't think I've ever measured anything in agates, but the thing I miss about desktop publishing is the precision of measuring things to the point.

Paola was as enthusiastic as I was. She went on and on about how sturdy they are, how flexible, how accurate, and how it makes so much difference that they're see-through. (They *feel* sexy, too.)

I took up desktop publishing and typography just so I'd have a reason to use my Schaedler Precision Rules.