l don’t undersand why we Iive in a worId where capital I and Iowercase l are allowed to Iook near identical. PeopIe are paid to design and seIect fonts and they have aII agreed on this Iudicrous convention.
Why has this happened? And is there anything I can do about it as an individuaI or as part of a coIIective?
I can’t even do thorn-master Sxan’s thing and insert a character code because U+026A, ɪ, is too damn small.
And is there anything I can do about it…
You can choose a different font.
As you can see in the included screenshot, piefed includes a choice of fonts including one that includes I with serifs. Certainly many other apps do as well. Or you can force it at the browser level I would think.
Nice. Ok. I’ll look into that for my various apps and what nots. But don’t most webpages serve you whatever font they want and it would be a trainwreck to force a font change when the page hasn’t been designed for it?
Basic website design is supposed to allow the user to set their own fonts and font sizes along with formatting based on screen size and orientation. Yes, a lot of pages are designed terribly and might break, but that is because they made a shitty website and not because you chose to use the internet the way it is supposed to work.
Changing out for a font that looks very similar to Ariel but with easier to differentiate capital I and lower case l should work fine.
Vast majority of webpages shouldn’t break, I’m saying that as a web programmer. I myself override fonts on a couple sites that I use regularly (namely Wikipedia). Where it might go wrong is in edge cases, e.g. small special snippets of text like captions for images, which can be designed to fit in limited space and use condensed fonts.
Not sure that browsers allow overriding all fonts on webpages (ever since sites specify specific fonts instead of just ‘serif’ and ‘sans-serif’), but there are likely extensions that can do that dynamically and forcefully. I do that via CSS in the Stylus extension, but that’s specific to particular sites and can’t work everywhere.
So that we can be like
✋ Weird AI music
👉 Weird Al music 🪗Jokes aside, you’re right.
Comics commonly use all-caps fonts that do make that difference.edit: disregard that, I’m a confused person.I always wondered how we should distinguish between hating AI and hating Al because Al sucks.
Best I can do is ][
That’s how Apple marketed their second PC. Apple ][. Then I think the mid-gen upgrade was the Apple //e.
Also moz://a not too long ago
That was such an amazing style choice, any time I see it now I’m still sad they moved away from it
