> But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form?
That’s beside the point because the spec states "A semantic line break must not alter the final rendered output of the document.”
And I think you’re misinterpreting what “plain text” refers to here. Not .txt files exclusively, but the markup languages mentioned as well that are...plain text. The final rendered output of these kind of documents are not themselves.
The expectation is that the source of whatever flavor of plain text is not the final output.
If this practice offends you, don’t use it. This is a specification suggesting a practice for you* to use.
How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?
Easy no, only some of them in some instances. There is no uniformity at such a scale / variety of collaboration.
> That’s beside the point because the spec states
It's not, and I've addressed this in the very next semantic line! And you've also ignored the very point in your quoted line as well. Editing "Readme.md in its raw form" with the extra line breaks is still bad regardless of the final rendered output.
> Not .txt files exclusively
I don't need exclusivity, complementarity still works. And again, final output doesn't save you
> If this practice offends you, don’t use it.
If the criticism offends you, practice in the shadows and don't publish the raw misformatted specs/docs!
> How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?
Sometimes by batch-replacing those extra newlines in a text editor, sometiems by abandoning reading because the text reflow is too broken, sometimes just by plowing through while cursing the cavemen that force their habits onto the readers with different devices.
Your aversion appears
to be psychological.
It seems to me like
you have trouble examining
things by the sum of
their parts and
semantic line breaks
agitate this.
You’re free to
the render “misformatted”
text in the format that it’s
intended to be viewed.
And I take it that
physical literature
is a burden for you
to bear.
My condolences.The point is that if these formatting snippets are useful for reading, we should extend this to all the readers too. If they are not, we should be mindful not to micro-optimize lest we confuse others and ourselves.
In my blog, I do this in my poems, such as: https://alejo.ch/39l — I don't expect this to be controversial, makes sense for poems, right?
However, I'm also experimenting with rendering my prose with the same type of breaks, like https://alejo.ch/3gb or https://alejo.ch/3g9
My guess, reading this thread, is that most people would tell me that they find the breaks annoying and would rather read my prose without the breaks? Hmm. Would love to hear some feedback.
Although I can get how someone else would feel that the text is too small and if the size was a conscious decision on your part to accommodate the line breaks they would hold you to blame further.
I think you’ve got a nice personal website overall. Even down to the drafts that lead to 404 errors; a nice touch even if unintentional.
Everybody wants personality to return to the Web again until they’ve got to deal with personalities.
You win some, you lose some.
I still might batch process all my notes to break at words up to 72 characters anyway! But I’ll be mindful to where safety goggles and proofread before grinding axes in public.
And I’m leaving the typo above in situ so as not to mislead you that I’m less prone to error under normal circumstances. I’m a WIP.