A lot of the behaviors should just have a toggle to turn them off. For example, there are many situations where margin collapsing is in the way and I keep wondering why there isn't simply a `margin-collapse: none`. It would also be nice to have something like `default-styles: none` that will remove all the default styling for h1/h2/etc. and em/strong/cite/etc. so I don't have to deal with browsers having differing defaults.
This is true, but my feeling is that with CSS, a lot of the weird decisions are for backwards compatibility with way back when HTML was just tag soup and browser implementations were haphazard.
Yet, for some reason, mobile browsers do not reflow when you zoom in, but instead insist on horizontal scrolling, unlike their desktop counterparts. I've never understood that.
I'm not the person you responded to, but I found the article unreadable because it kept going on about Ev’s life instead of her research. I'm sure her research is valuable and insightful, but with this style of reporting it is both inaccessible to me, and it gives me the (probably flawed) impression that her research isn't the part of her life that's supposed to be important or impressive.
> (even assuming we know we're just talking about earth)
This is a nitpick, but life on other planets wouldn't be called “animals”. Animal is a clade defined by common ancestry. The only way you could have an extraterrestrial animal is for it to have evolved on Earth and then migrated somehow, and I think we can fairly confidently rule that out.
I was talking into the void. I gave up after 6 months of getting no reaction and finding nobody of interest to follow.
(Worse, half of what I wrote is now gone because my instance shut down and Mastodon doesn't even have a feature to migrate any content to a new instance.)
Windows user here. It goes vastly further than that. I've been using Windows since version 3.0. I'm used to it to the point where it's second nature. Linux is foreign and difficult to comprehend, not least because it explicitly avoids being anything like Windows or accommodating habits people acquired from Windows. I don't like the direction Windows is going any more than anyone, and I'm avoiding Windows 11 for the time being, but as long as Linux people continue to believe that the only reason Windows users don't switch is because they don't know Linux exists, Linux will not be able to attract Windows users even as Windows goes full capitalist enshittification.
> Hey, unless you can articulate a really good reason to add this, maybe our default posture should be no icons in menus?
Challenge accepted. If a user (esp. one whose cognition generally prefers visual media) uses a menu item frequently, they can remember its icon and that makes it easier to find in the future.
(Doesn't apply to me personally though because I'll instead remember the underlined letter and press it next time. My pet peeve in menus is not icons, but missing or clashing hotkeys.)
I think icons aren't a bad idea, if they are visually distinct and make sense. For the longest time, the icon for "link" and "attachment" in Gmail looked almost identical.
They changed it recently for attachment to look like a paperclip on a document which is much better. But before, I almost always clicked on one when I wanted the other (or hovered my mouse over it for longer than I'd care to admit).
Almost 30 years ago MS Office 97 was putting toolbar icons in their menus, and I think it served the useful function of helping users discover when functionality was available another way.
Those icons were well-designed for the newly computerized office employee of the day. The new school of icons are made by graphic designers for other graphic designers.
How can you remember the underlined "i" when it's so tiny and also positioned in random places? These should be in their own column just like a checkmark or an icon (but yes, no single key navigation is way worse than bad icons)
I like the idea of placing the hotkeys in a column of their own. Nevertheless, even if the underlined i is sometimes hard to notice, I only need to find it until I've memorized it.
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