bboard

Posted by funkyass

Posted by sureanem

What's the point of the horizontal lines?

The stripes in the background are to check the vertical rhythm, and are not part of the Typesetter stylesheet proper. You can toggle them on and off.

Posted by Screwtape
I was trying to go for contrast without being boring and monochromatic, so I picked a nice, pale yellow. If there's some reputably-recommended readable colour-scheme I'm interested, but honestly, there's a reason I put all the colouring in a separate CSS file. For my own site, I just went with Solarized because that's my go-to answer for anything colour-scheme related.

It's nice to see people putting effort into measuring such things, but if I read the first bit of that page correctly, "success" means "the user stayed on the page for at least 40 seconds. I'm sure they're accurately measuring *something*, but I'm not sure it's a metric I personally care about.

Yeah, somebody else mentioned [paragraph indent/spacing]. I'll definitely change it.

I assume by "width" you mean "height". Keeping a consistent line-height is very deliberate, and is the main thing I wanted to achieve when I set out - text feels more consistent with a vertical rhythm, and less like a bunch of separate blocks pasted together.

The book I'm working from is very consistent about vertical rhythm in the main body, but it does use a smaller line-height for footnotes (at the bottom of the page) and side-notes (in the left or right margins). Unfortunately, HTML doesn't really have footnotes as such, and although I use the HTML5 <aside> for side-notes, if the browser is narrow enough they get folded back into the main body. I'll think about using a smaller line-height for side-notes that actually appear on the side, but I'll tackle paragraph spacing first.

Posted by wareya
Blank line plus REVERSE indentation. Fight me.

Posted by BearOso
Say what!? Now I know you're trolling. If there's one advancement in computing that isn't overblown it's SSDs. The performance difference from less latency in random access is very significant. On top of that they don't make noise, consume less power, and aren't susceptible to head crashes.

I wouldn't seriously throw a laptop away, but IPS and VA are objectively better than TN. It's perfectly fine if the difference just doesn't seem like a big deal to you, personally. To each his own.

Posted by funkyass
[Image of Fry squinting]

Ditto.

Posted by Screwtape

Posted by sureanem
The Financial Times use #33302e / #fff1e5. That looks very nice, I think, although it shouldn't be ideal - reddish text on salmon background isn't exactly optimal from what I gather.

That looks pretty nice, although I'd feel a bit awkward straight-up stealing somebody's colour-scheme unless it was deliberately made available, like Solarized.

I got rid of the blank lines between paragraphs; the demonstration site is updated. I also made a bunch of other changes following the example and instruction of the typography book I'm following:

...

Ideally I'd use <h1> for the document title, <h2> for sections and <h3> for sub-sections, but Markdown only makes <h1> and <h2> pleasant to use, so either I use h2 for sections and lose subsections, or have the document title look the same as a section heading.

So I'm not *entirely* happy with the way the stylesheet looks now, but I can't think of any changes that are likely to improve *every* semantic-markup HTML document - it seems like every improvement for one document makes a different document worse.

Ideally I'd use <h1> for the document title, <h2> for sections and <h3> for sub-sections, but Markdown only makes <h1> and <h2> pleasant to use, so either I use h2 for sections and lose subsections, or have the document title look the same as a section heading.

Posted by Screwtape

Posted by sureanem
Black on salmon-pink is standard for such newspapers

This surprises me. The only similar publications I can think of are Bloomberg and the Australian Financial Review, and neither of them are pink. In fact, the article you link says "The paper, first published in 1888, tinted its pages in 1893 to distinguish itself from its rival", so I'm guessing it's not actually a standard for such newspapers after all.

So, Markdown supports two different heading syntaxes: ATX headings with the leading hashes (inherited from ATX), and Setex headings (inherited from Setext), which look like this:

...

As a purely personal opinion, I love Setext headings and hate ATX headings. Setext headings *look* like headings, even in plain text, while ATX headings sometimes get confused with hashtags. A level-1 Setext header uses more "ink", so it looks more important than a level-2 Setext header, while a level-1 ATX header looks *less* important than a level-2 ATX header.

Letting inline code stretch rightward forever is ugly, force-wrapping it with a hyphen is (potentially) misleading, and force-wrapping it without a hyphen is also (potentially) misleading). I guess we probably shouldn't insert glyphs into what is supposed to be a verbatim string, though.

That's entirely up to the fonts your browser has chosen, I'm afraid. It probably defaults to Times New Roman and/or Ariel; I recommend reconfiguring your browser to something nicer.

I'm using a CSS media-query to move the <nav> and <aside> elements to the margins, when there's enough room for them. Unfortunately for me, browsers define the "viewport width" to include the width of the vertical scrollbar, even though that space isn't available for my content. I'd changed the media-query to add a bit of safety margin, so the wide layout should only be used when you really, truly have enough room for it... unless your browser's default text size is smaller than your operating system's scrollbar size.

Posted by https://www.ft.com/content/1120377e-c4c8-11e9-a8e9-296ca66511c9
US senses breakthrough in Venezuela crisis

Contact with Maduro’s de facto deputy may unlock solution to political stalemate

Michael Stott, Latin America editor
August 22, 2019

He is variously known as a drug trafficker, a thug, a loyal revolutionary and the power behind the throne in Venezuela.
But his friends and enemies agree on one thing: Diosdado Cabello is one of the most important links in the chain holding up President Nicolás Maduro’s government.

So when news emerged this week that Mr Cabello had met a US intermediary for secret talks about a possible solution to Venezuela’s long-running political crisis, all sides rushed to put their own spin on the development.
Venezuela has slid into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with up to a quarter of its population fleeing abroad as refugees. Years of misrule by the hard-left government have shrunk gross domestic product by more than half and destroyed oil production. Sweeping US sanctions have choked most remaining economic activity.

Propped up by Russia, Cuba and China, Mr Maduro’s government is clinging to power after what was widely seen as a rigged election last year. It has refused opposition demands for fresh elections and an interim government headed by Juan Guaidó, the head of the National Assembly and the man recognised by the US and more than 50 other mainly Western nations as Venezuela’s rightful leader.

The stalemate between Mr Maduro and Mr Guaidó has persisted throughout this year, dashing US hopes of an early end to the crisis and forcing Washington to consider other ways of achieving a breakthrough, such as covert talks with the regime.

Trump administration officials have talked before about contacts with other high-ranking Maduro government members. But they hailed news of a meeting with Mr Cabello as a breakthrough, saying it signified growing disarray at the heart of the Chavista government. According to Associated Press, which first reported the contact, it took place in Caracas last month, and a second encounter is planned.

“There have been multiple talks with over half a dozen officials in competing centres of power around Maduro,” said one senior US official. “He should wake up to the fact that these conversations are about a transition to end his power grab.”

“The constant themes in all conversations were: how to get out of the crisis, how to find an exit for Maduro, and how to save their own skins and those of their families, not necessarily in that order.”

Not surprisingly, Mr Maduro did not see it that way. Speaking during the opening of a bus terminal in the Caribbean port of La Guaira on Tuesday, the Venezuelan leader joked about revealing a secret to his audience before confirming that talks between his government and the Trump administration had taken place during the past few months “under my express and direct authorisation”.

Looking relaxed and confident, Mr Maduro said that if Mr Trump ever wanted to talk seriously about a plan to solve the Venezuela conflict, he was always open to it.

“Whether or not Maduro knows about the conversations, it’s clever of him to indicate that he does,” said one former senior US official with experience in Venezuela. “The whole purpose is to let his supporters know that the Americans have given up on the Venezuelan opposition and are now talking to him.”

Vanessa Neumann, Mr Guaidó’s envoy to the UK, said the Venezuelan opposition was pursuing a multipronged strategy to end the crisis, and the latest contacts between Mr Cabello and the US were part of that. “We will do anything it takes. We will go anywhere and talk to anyone,” she said. “The race is on to see who betrays whom. The regime will be broken by a lack of loyalty.”

Those close to developments in Caracas said Mr Cabello is a particularly important figure not just because he is head of the National Constituent Assembly, a rival parliament set up by Mr Maduro after the opposition won the formal parliament, or because of his media reach via a weekly television programme. His military credentials as a former soldier who fought alongside Hugo Chávez also matter to the powerful armed forces, whose confidence he enjoys.

Noting that Washington had negotiated successfully with Mr Cabello before, when he agreed in 2015 to hold national assembly elections, which were subsequently won by the opposition, the former senior US official said: “I do think a deal is there to be done. The issue is that Maduro and his government are not going to rely on guarantees made by the US or the [opposition] for their security and wellbeing.”

“Both sides are trying to use these revelations against the other,” said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “Only they will know exactly what was discussed but the fact both Maduro and Trump have admitted being in touch is an implicit recognition of the need for some kind of meaningful, bigger negotiations to resolve the crisis.”

Mr Cabello is believed to want to lead Chavista forces in any future elections, which poses problems for a US administration that has publicly denounced him as a drug trafficker, a money launderer and an embezzler. Instead, Washington is hoping that Mr Maduro’s government will crumble amid internal divisions. John Bolton, Mr Trump’s national security adviser, has compared the key figures in the regime to “scorpions in a bottle, staring each other down, waiting to see who stings first”.

But after so many false dawns for opposition hopes in Venezuela, observers are cautious. “It could be hyperactive paralysis,” said Nicholas Watson, who leads Latin America political risk coverage for consultancy firm Teneo. “Lots of parts moving but nothing is actually happening.”

Additional reporting by Gideon Long in Bogotá

The UNHCR stated that conditions in Syria are still unsafe and destitute, improvements in many areas are uncertain and many basic services are absent; access of aid convoys is also a challenge.[8] Less than a half of the returnees have access to water or health services, due to extremely damaged infrastructure. An estimated 10 per cent ended up as internally displaced persons once again.[9]