Release 86, Earthquake relief, Halloween events, Tim Daly interview

[news]

October 27th, 2011 - Happy Halloween and welcome to the official newsletter for all things LiveJournal! Bringing you information about system updates, community events, LJ social outreach, and other newsworthy nuggets from the world of LiveJournal. A quick note before we jump in: we've posted an update at lj_maintenance outlining a service issue that sprung up

Comments

[caras_galadhon]

Can someone explain to me why this obsession with fixed-width fonts and entries? I honestly, really and truly do not understand what advantages it has other than, "We think it looks pretty." (Which, btw, going by how the html web-based entry box looks with the new fixed-width font, is, er, not at all true.)

Is there some viewing/formatting advantage that outweighs the fact that it looks like crap in various personalized styles/through various browsers/causes accessibility concerns? That means it's better to start up and crosspost to another LJ news journal for those of us who don't like it rather than keep things centralized? Because I say, without any irony or sarcasm, that I just don't get it.

[slinkslowdown]

What is a fixed-with font? IDGI.

[mokie]

If you held up a tiny ruler, your m and your i would take the same amount of space in a fixed-width font. Typewriters produce fixed-width letters, because the hammer for each letter is the same width; programmers apparently prefer fixed-width fonts, maybe because it's tidier or something.

The opposite, variable-width fonts, say, "Hey, the i doesn't need that much room--scooch down!", which many consider more readable.

(Edited because programmers do not prefer typewriters, I swear.)

[logicandlove]

programmers do not prefer typewriters, I swear.

that would be a fun way to code....

[caras_galadhon]

They're fonts where each letter/symbol occupies the same amount of (horizontal) space as all other letters. They were developed around the time typewriters were everywhere, because of the way a typewriter moves along a track and can't vary the amount of space between characters. Variable-width fonts, OTOH, have characters that take up less or more space depending on what characters they are (so an "i" would take up less space than an "m", for instance).

Basically, fixed-width is an older style of typeface that results in blocks of text all taking up the same amount of space regardless of content. A fixed-width entry is the same principle, but with the added "bonus" of forcing the entry to hit a certain number of pixels in width on the page and not wrap around or drop words to the next line when the space is exceeded.

(Ooops! Looks like I was a couple minutes too slow with my response.)

[fencer_x]

Given the huge range in screen sizes and resolutions and on top of that the fact that most every user's entry-area width will differ, I absolutely don't get the POINT of fixed-width entries.

You're screwing over 90% of users' views of this entry.

[caras_galadhon]

That's exactly it, and exactly why I'm confused. I'm not sure why (possible) programmer preference for fixed-width would be privileged over keeping readability high. There's been no explanation I've been able to find, other than this insistence, over and over again, that they're moving to fixed-width fonts and entries. Yeah, ok, why? Maybe it would be less annoying and make more sense if there was a why offered, because right now, it just seems like someone on the backend is being stubborn about formatting for no good reason. *sigh*

[crossinthenight]

For the font issue: most people are referring to the font in the HTML input area on the post submission screen, which used to be in a fixed-width, easy-to-read Courier-esque font but was recently changed to be the same as the normal sans-serif font used in the RTE side (which made people think at first they were typing in the RTE, which was confusing) from the font that you see when you type up a comment in this post (and on many comment forms in LJ, unless they've been customized by the journal owner).

I find the fixed-width font easier to read and more familiar, definitely better than the font they had changed it to. They've changed it back to A fixed-width font, but not the same one as before, and now it just looks like shit, especially on Windows computers in Firefox (looks weird on my Mac at work in Firefox, but not unbearable, whereas my Windows 7 machine at home is...ugh).

[lafinjack]

When you're writing code, like you do in the HTML editor and these comment boxes, fixed width fonts are very much preferable over a normal font. A single character can mess up an entire post, such as an apostrophe (') instead of a quote mark ("), or an I instead of an l, and fixed width fonts make these errors much easier to spot.

[imc]

+1.

Dear LiveJournal, please do not fix the width of news entries as this will just muck up lots of people's styles (and I write as someone who probably won't notice the difference if it's fixed at 600px - though I certainly will if it's much more than that).

In addition, please stop messing with the font, since by doing that you are presuming to know what I want better than I did when I selected the default font for my journal style.

Thirdly, please include image size attributes in your news posts so that those of us who have image placeholders turned on for large images won't have those ugly squares all over the place.

Thanks.

[aiki]

The messing with the font pisses me off more than anything else. Maybe because right now it's not breaking my friends page but the text looks like crap.

Aside from that I can't believe LJ staff who post to news are among the people who are too stupid to modify their own CSS if they don't like how their stuff looks and instead shove it into everyone else's faces.

Edited because sometimes I forget words. Or write them twice.