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It's amazing how blind to humanity we developers can be.

If you take the human out of the batters box, you're no longer playing baseball. Baseball is a game. Played by humans for the sake of competition. If you build a robot that is able to hit every ball. Guess what? There's no point in playing baseball anymore. Have you "solved" baseball? Or have you destroyed the usefulness of it?

Approaching baseball by solving the physics of the bat and ball is completely missing the point of the game.

Trying to "solve" typography is equally meaningless. There are no definite answers to be found for the meaning of Coca-Cola red or IBM blue.




You are wrong in a subtle way. Robots playing baseball would be silly and useless. Almost as bad as athletes who use steroids (ha!). But baseball is a sport. Sport and art are similar: by humans for humans is usually the winning formula.

Typography can be art. It can also be utilitarian. Most typography is. Imagine if the entire WWW used either Comic Sans or Times New Roman with 1.x or 2.x line spacing. Just no. I am willing to bet you have published stuff online (even this comment; how meta), and your publications have benefited from having good typography. Typography that you didn’t have to think about or arrange or pick out. Making utilitarian typography more beautiful is a benefit to everyone. If only a select educated and experienced few could use beautiful typography because it was an arcane art, as you seem to want it to be, then well, we’d be using Comic Sans. If using more advanced mathematical models results in 99.999% of the readable web being more beautiful, I am for it. It doesn’t preclude someone from doing work by hand to either stand out more or to create art. But it certainly would be good for everyone if more advanced models existed. This is the same as how it is better that we have Google Fonts as opposed to every website owner having to create or commission a from scratch font.




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