June 30, 2002, 6:52 PM ET
'The scourge of Arial'
I just stumbled upon Mark Simonson's "The scourge of Arial", which outlines the history of that incredibly ugly font.
Makes for interesting reading. It turns out Arial was developed as a "look-alike" font based on Helvetica, one of the more popular/trendy fonts of the mid to late 20th Century. Font vendors created Arial to compete with Adobe, which licensed Helvetica in the early '80s. (Yes, that's much like creating a generic version of Cheerios.) The result? A lousy-looking rip off of a font that, according to the article, was out of style anyway.
After reading the article, I wondered how many news sites used Arial heavily, and whether the use/avoidance of Arial correlated in any way with site quality. After a quick, unscientific glance at the list of 2002 EPpy Award winners, I reached my unfortunate answer: 13 of the 20 award-winning sites use Arial in some way on their home pages. (Yuck!) Six use Arial extensively for navigation. (Double yuck!) And here's the killer: The site that won the award for "Best Design of a Newspaper Online Service," usatoday.com, uses Arial to an almost pain-inducing degree.
How disheartening. Just think of how much better those sites would look if they used a different font -- perhaps one designed for the screen, not one ripped off of a circa-1960 trend.
June 30, 2002, 3:03 PM ET
Comment system is up and running
I've finished version 1.0 of this blog's comment system.
Each blog entry now has a "Comments" link below it, along with the number of comments that already have been posted for that entry. If you're using a modern browser, clicking the link will dynamically display the comments below the blog entry, without having to reload the page. If you're not using a modern browser, clicking the link will load a new page with all of the comments.
If more than 5 comments have been posted on a particular entry, a new page will be loaded regardless of whether your browser is nifty. I did this to keep this site's bandwidth low (i.e., comments will only be preloaded if there are 5 or fewer).
I hope this fosters some good discussion. I've already received a few e-mails from people requesting this feature, so I'm very excited to see whether it catches on.
NOTE: I was inspired by Andrew Porter Glendinning's comment system. Mine is a little different -- no pop-up windows, more bandwidth-efficient, style differences -- but I figured I should give credit where credit is due.
