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A comment on Formatting your web content to be a pleasure to read. Parent comment

Re:Formatting your web content to be a pleasure to read by wvl on Sunday April 03, 2011 @09:35AM (#2402641)
I am quite sure that is done deliberately. I can't find a good resource to point to, but this article by Mark Boulton describes why you would do that with bulleted lists. I would assume that the same applies to ordered lists:

http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-st...

> With the advent of desktop publishing it became suddenly very easy and cost-effective to produce bodies of text. The problem was these bodies of text work within a box. Every character in this box had to be within the box, Hanging Punctuation requires characters to be out of the box. This was a problem for the software and as a result was ignored. An important aspect of typesetting just swept under the carpet like that. It’s a great shame.

And:

> A ranged left body of type is pretty much destroyed, aesthetically, when punctuation isn’t hung. The eye looks for straight lines everywhere, when type is indented in this way, it destroys the flow of text.

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Re:Formatting your web content to be a pleasure to read by verysimple on Sunday April 03, 2011 @03:28PM (#2403610)
I'm not a typographer, but I am a reader and I don't agree with his opinion that the list with hanging bullets makes it more legible. I find them slightly confusing. Maybe it's my programming background, but it just makes sense to indent something positively to emphasize context.

I do agree though that the hanging bullets add sophistication, but when I write that's not really my primary concern.

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Re:Formatting your web content to be a pleasure to read by knowtheory on Sunday April 03, 2011 @09:42AM (#2402657)
What i don't understand is why there's incongruity between the numbered headers and the numbered lists. Surely if you're going to stick the list numbers in the margins, the header numbers should be in the margins as well?
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Re:Formatting your web content to be a pleasure to read by po on Sunday April 03, 2011 @10:04AM (#2402689)
I don't think so. The numbers in the header are more like an outline of items. The numbers in the list are not part of the outline. Hanging the numbers in the gutter is the typographically "proper" treatment there.
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