Comment by brian_cloutier
6 years ago
> If this is your argument
I was not providing an argument, I was attempting to save time by rebutting the argument I thought you would make.
Why do you find this trend "ridiculous" and "disturbing"? Deeper in this thread you state this is somehow worse UX, and makes the text less readable. I... don't see how it's any less readable, could you elaborate?
I had thought you might say that this style is distracting, because it is so unusual you're involuntarily pulled from the content and made to focus on the form. I was trying to say, this effect is real, but it is at worst a temporary one. As you note this is a real trend and I expect soon we'll all be used to it. I'm already pretty used to it.
It's also a little ironic that you're rebelling against a new capitalization scheme but you're happy to use "BTW". Can you find a dictionary from 10 years ago which includes "BTW"? You're clearly okay with some form of language evolution, why draw the line here?
> Deeper in this thread you state this is somehow worse UX, and makes the text less readable. I... don't see how it's any less readable, could you elaborate?
Sure. I argue that this "style" provides poor UX due to decreased readability. Why decreased readability? Well ... Since late Middle Ages (maybe even earlier), people have realized that it is much easier to visually distinguish and consume concepts (in the form of sentences and paragraphs) when they are marked by specially formed characters (capital letters for sentences and initials aka drop caps for paragraphs and chapters). The following link points to the image (as an example) of an illuminated Psalter manuscript from Southern Germany circa 1240-1260: https://www.abebooks.com/images/medieval-manuscripts/german-.... You see what I mean, don't you? Read on ...
> ... this is a real trend and I expect soon we'll all be used to it.
I strongly disagree - there is no chance we all get used to it. With 99.(9)% of all text in the world using traditional capitalization rules / approach, it is practically infeasible that we all somehow get used to an extremely tiny subset of visual styles that make no sense to our brain. Historically, psychologically and, more importantly, physiologically, humans are wired for chunking information for easier digestion and anything that obstructs that is doomed to fail. Here is a relevant UX-focused article on the subject: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/chunking.
> It's also a little ironic that you're rebelling against a new capitalization scheme but you're happy to use "BTW" ... You're clearly okay with some form of language evolution, why draw the line here?
I draw the line between using a slang abbreviation widely prevalent on the Internet - essentially a de facto standard abbreviation for informal communication (which my brief comment on Hacker News certainly is) - and using an extremely unusual, to put it politely, text capitalization scheme for a long (and much more formal than my comment) blog post.