August 10, 2005 at 3:41PM JavaWorld Really Needs a Redesign.
Cormac has my laptop, and I’ve gone as far as I can with the work I can do without it, so I started catching up on some reading.
One of my stops was JavaWorld. It always has a couple of interesting articles, and one that caught my eye was one on writing custom appenders for log4j. It’s an old one, but one that I haven’t read before.
There was something odd about the first paragraph in the article, something that didn’t quite sit right with me, and then I realised that the dropcap, rather than being an actual letter, was an image.
Just in case it was a matter of that being an old article and that they’d fixed this in more recent one--each article is after all just a HTML page and they mightn’t regenerate between design tweaks--I check this one, which is only a month old. And what do you know: it’s using images for dropcaps too.
Now, in this day and age (or at least since around 2000), there’s no reason why anybody should be doing dropcaps like this anymore. Not only is there a CSS pseudo-element called first-letter specifically for this that’s been around since CSS1, and all you need beside that are the float and font-size properties to do the rest of the work.
Why are people still doing this crap?