I disagree. Full justification is less legible than left justification because it removes the positional cue of varied line lengths, and monospaced font for body text decreases information density for no good reason, which also hurts legibility by forcing unnecessary eye movement. I don't usually complain about typography because Firefox's Reader View can usually fix it, but here Reader View makes the diagrams unreadable. Instead, the font can be changed easily enough with the Web Developer Tools, but the text justification is more annoying because it's specified multiple times for different blocks of text.
Funny, I find this one of the more ledgible blogs i've seen recently :) Isn't it personal preference? Same with, dare I say it, line length. I have colleagues that insist 80 characters is ideal, I think it is terrible and should be illegal.
But more to the point, I am pretty sure it is in reference to not being bloated with crappy JS spyware, no moving photos when scrolling, no ads, no subcribe popups, no 'you only have free 2 articles left', no overriding the f'ing text selection so i cannot copy paste code... So not medium.com basically.
Sure the font and justification could have been different, to each his own. But yeah, I was referring to the simplicity, the table layout, prudent use of color and the absence of JS.
I find the web to be unusable without configuring a Pi-Hole to be my DNS server.
I think he is saying that the web was meant to be difficult to read.
He is expressing nostalgia for a time when information gathering had exciting new possibilities because of the internet was new, but before we over optimized the soul out of everything.
It's a slippery slope, because certainly the page could be more readable, and most people would want that, but then what's the next improvement? Sidebar links to similar blogs you might like?
I agree with you; there have been studies that showed both that left justified text and proportional typefaces are generally more legible.
I wonder though - for long-time coders like a lot of the audience here - have we become inured to reading monospaced fonts, such that we read them easier and are therefore an anomaly in such studies?
I know I cannot code at all with variable-width fonts, but is that because I'm old school and grew up coding in the Time Before when there were only monospaced fonts?
