I regularly wordsmith comments in my column-constrained code (e.g. 100 columns) for prettiness—I don’t like to have just one or two words on the last line of a multi-line comment, so I will normally fiddle things to get that last line either empty or a bit fuller. I will just about always do this if it’s a single line plus a word or two. I also definitely enjoy occasionally indulging in the style of perfect line-filling this submission is talking about; but even when I don’t go to the trouble of filling lines, I regularly tweak line break positions to balance line lengths and to start sentences or phrases at new lines.
This style of craftsmanship, embracing constraints and optimising for beauty or even whimsy, is something that is sadly often not possible now with the diverse presentation media we employ: in the past we would adapt the medium and presentation to the content, but we’ve shifted to mostly adapting the content and presentation to the medium.
A paper book had static presentation, and so you could tweak things to your heart’s desire; and if someone had bad eyesight, you could produce a larger version of it while keeping everything else intact, if you desired. One particularly good example of that is static paginations of certain Bible translations; for example, the KJV has a couple of extremely popular paginations, so that one person may have a small Bible with tiny text and another a large Bible with wide margins and large text, but they’ll still turn the page at the same time. (This can lead to church services where most of the audience turns the page during a reading of scripture at the same time!)
But in a digital world, your content needs to adapt to display on devices both tiny and huge, and you will have limited control of its presentation. Static layout like this Super Metroid guide no longer works: at 73 columns wide, it’s too small for display on portrait phone screens without introducing scrolling (awful), additional wrapping (ugly) or reflowing (losing the craftsmanship, and impossible to do fully automatically anyway).
Responsive design is all about embracing the fact that you don’t know the medium, and working with that. And yes, it lets you do some nice previously-impossible stuff and work better on a diverse range of devices, but it also loses something.
I once noticed, part way through writing an essay in school, that I had started the last three lines with the letter w; I ran with it and made every line for the rest of the essay start with the letter w.
I could go on to talk of a great many more things where we’ve lost something over the techniques of old due to low-quality computerisation of something formerly done by experts; but also that better computerised alternatives are often available which claw back some or most of the deficit, typically by more deliberately attempting to imitate what the experts did rather than doing the easiest thing; greedy line-breaking is nigh ubiquitous, but there is also Knuth-Plass; most computerised music engraving is fairly atrocious, but LilyPond exists.
> something that is sadly often not possible now with the diverse presentation media we employ
I miss using <tables> and 1px invisible GIFs to create pixel-perfect web layouts from Photoshop. But there's also something to be said for creating a perfectly re-arranging fluid layout.
No it’s not. It allows you to get the fixed medium that was lost, yes, but loses the flexibility that is far more important given the reality of the devices people have—and that’s only talking about screen sizes, not even the other problems of accessing and viewing PDFs.
This style of craftsmanship, embracing constraints and optimising for beauty or even whimsy, is something that is sadly often not possible now with the diverse presentation media we employ: in the past we would adapt the medium and presentation to the content, but we’ve shifted to mostly adapting the content and presentation to the medium.
A paper book had static presentation, and so you could tweak things to your heart’s desire; and if someone had bad eyesight, you could produce a larger version of it while keeping everything else intact, if you desired. One particularly good example of that is static paginations of certain Bible translations; for example, the KJV has a couple of extremely popular paginations, so that one person may have a small Bible with tiny text and another a large Bible with wide margins and large text, but they’ll still turn the page at the same time. (This can lead to church services where most of the audience turns the page during a reading of scripture at the same time!)
But in a digital world, your content needs to adapt to display on devices both tiny and huge, and you will have limited control of its presentation. Static layout like this Super Metroid guide no longer works: at 73 columns wide, it’s too small for display on portrait phone screens without introducing scrolling (awful), additional wrapping (ugly) or reflowing (losing the craftsmanship, and impossible to do fully automatically anyway).
Responsive design is all about embracing the fact that you don’t know the medium, and working with that. And yes, it lets you do some nice previously-impossible stuff and work better on a diverse range of devices, but it also loses something.
I once noticed, part way through writing an essay in school, that I had started the last three lines with the letter w; I ran with it and made every line for the rest of the essay start with the letter w.
I could go on to talk of a great many more things where we’ve lost something over the techniques of old due to low-quality computerisation of something formerly done by experts; but also that better computerised alternatives are often available which claw back some or most of the deficit, typically by more deliberately attempting to imitate what the experts did rather than doing the easiest thing; greedy line-breaking is nigh ubiquitous, but there is also Knuth-Plass; most computerised music engraving is fairly atrocious, but LilyPond exists.