It's how English was written in the "olden times". At that time, little flairs (such as ligatures) were pretty common, and were very fanciful. Some simpler ligatures (like ff) survive today, but embellished ones (like ct) were toned down. It's just a stylistic choice to draw them one way or another, but it's jarring to see the fancier ones in "modern" texts because we're used to the simpler styles.

Fun fact: The German "eszsett" (ß; U+00DF) is a ligature for "ss" (specifically the "long s"[0] and a normal "s") that evolved over time to be one "letter".[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sz_modern.svg

To me it just feels out of place, like a calligraphy ligature got accidentally mixed with a standard serif font. From what I've seen this kind of ligature is usually applied to many other letter combinations as well, in which case it at least looks consistent.

The same goes for the ampersand – “et” slowly morphed into “&”.

> It's how English was written in the "olden times".

Exactly.

(skipping some minor details)

When we started printing instead of writing, we dumbed the letterset down into fewer mechanical pieces. Thus earlier printers in English had to use the letter 'f' for the discarded "long 's'" letter, back when the long 's' was still expected by readers.

And that dumbed-down letterset was the one that then made it to typewriters and then our keyboard today.

According to the Wikipedia page for eszett [0] it evolved from "sz", as the name "eszett" suggests. (I only realized the link with "z" when I saw "tz" ligatures on street signs in Berlin.) Given that its typographic origin is sz, and given that its name literally says sz, I wish the spelling reformists had gone for sz rather than ss!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F

It's one way it was written, I bet. If my experience from old Norwegian church books is any indication, there were a lot of ligature fads. Some liked to replace all double consonants with a single consonant with a line over, for instance. It had a good couple of decades.

Do we really need to continue this stuff on computer screens.

Ligatures are old fashioned in English but still very common in French. Some ligatures are actually mandatory (like the oe in cœur, heart) while others like st are pretty common in proper typefaces such as those used for novels. The author is probably French (Aurélien).

I've been writing almost exclusively in cursive for my entire life past age 8 and that font looks crazy to me. I learned both D'Nealian and Zaner-Bloser in different schools and have seen a lot of my grandmother's writing, which was semi-Spenserian.

The stroke just doesn't go in the right direction for those ligatures. My guess is that this font is based on a French (or maybe other latin) script.

These ligatures are definitely French ligatures. See for example this picture from French wikipedia,

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ligature_typograph...

But also French typographical ligatures (well beyond the syntactic ones that are mandatory) aren't really related to cursives, they are a typographical convention. like the cursive s doesn't look like s and wouldn't have a ligature with t from the top of the t in cursive. (However, at least for French cursives it's common to do a single cross for double tt which I guess is a ligature?)

I also only learned cursives in school. In fact writing in script was forbidden and not taught at all.

Perhaps the website was designed for a french audience, and an alternate theme not created for the english localisation of this article...

They also space out question marks, exclamation marks and colons, which is standard in French but not in English.