Yesterday, I shared some spicy takes. A few were particularly controversial—most notably, that I correct Gif the correct way (with a soft G)—but I also got a lot of emails asking me to elaborate on a few of them.
Today, I wanted to talk about how tabs are objectively better than spaces. This won’t take long.
Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not.
That reminds me of those times when back on reddit some dev showed up to present their new GUI library. Bragging about how they were better than Qt devs etc. (even though they didn’t implement the hard parts, like working text fields or tables)
After some time a bunch of people had enough and started bullying those guys into submission about accessibility. After some time, every of those toolkits had support or at least plans for supporting screenreaders. Eventually, AccessKit became a thing.
Arguing that it’s invincible to convince people at large to adopt tabs over spaces with good arguments is a ridiculous statement
I do actually think that it is very hard to convince basically every programmer of something, no matter how good arguments you have.
Also, without knowing much about the issue, it sounds a bit like the tooling for people using braille displays isn’t very good and fixing that is maybe also worth advocating for, perhaps it’s even a strategy for advocacy that is more effective?
deleted by creator
That reminds me of those times when back on reddit some dev showed up to present their new GUI library. Bragging about how they were better than Qt devs etc. (even though they didn’t implement the hard parts, like working text fields or tables)
After some time a bunch of people had enough and started bullying those guys into submission about accessibility. After some time, every of those toolkits had support or at least plans for supporting screenreaders. Eventually, AccessKit became a thing.
Good times.
I do actually think that it is very hard to convince basically every programmer of something, no matter how good arguments you have.
Also, without knowing much about the issue, it sounds a bit like the tooling for people using braille displays isn’t very good and fixing that is maybe also worth advocating for, perhaps it’s even a strategy for advocacy that is more effective?