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Notices for 16th September 2026

Experimentation

Testing a custom font for the first time, not for the typography per se, but because web fonts bypass the horrible hinting system that plagues Windows! CSS doesn’t seem to have a “draw font nicely” option, so the only alternative is to find something vaguely close to Helvetica that isn’t hinted. I’m not settled on Inter, but it will suffice for now. The next problem is that using font-feature-settings: "cv01", "ss03", "cv10" to improve the typography (let alone the need for tighter tracking with Inter) causes weird problems for other fonts that support OpenType: I never realised that Arial has a variety of alternative letter forms quietly waiting to be unlocked.

CSS needs a way to scope all the font and text settings to only the specified font, and disallow them to be inherited anywhere that a different typeface is used, because whatever that site feature is, it doesn’t want the OpenType customisation and other adjustments needed to pretend that the font you really wanted actually exists.

Of course, hardware compositing is incompatible with sub-pixel anti-aliasing, so only by having hardware acceleration disabled is there any hope of getting really nice type on Lo-DPI.

Dark mode support is improved; various mistakes had persisted because I don’t use dark mode except for testing. These changes include adding dark mode support to the Mindcontemplation sub-site, something long overlooked (although it and the Fragmentary Glimpses of Eternity sub-site were included in the upgrade to vector graphics back in 2019).

The blue link colour has been retuned in dark mode for readability but blue is hard to see on black (raising the question of why completely illegible blue-on-black is part of so many Linux syntax highlight schemes, and suggesting that most people see blue a lot brighter), so the contrast will never be ideal. (That or the developers of Linux text editors are even more sadomasochistic than the rest of the Linux ecosphere.)

Subtle colouration is applied to heading levels to gently indicate when you are changing heading level, without too much visual disruption, and without going too formal and numbering them. This is still an experiment.

External links used to be signalled with a suffix icon, a feature which has long been disabled. As a further experiment, external links are now shown in a different colour, of which there are few to choose between. Red suggests broken links to anyone familiar with wikis. Blue is already used. Green is the site theme colour and suggests the exact opposite of what is intended. Yellow wouldn’t be readable in light mode. Magenta and purple suggest visited links (old Web default). Orange is currently selected but this is subject to change.

Other tweaks include de-emphasised link underlines (and a balanced uniform underline distance), and less recently, subtle improvements to table presentation.

The general design remains as it has been for the last 23 years, but more refined. Like polishing a turd.

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