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.
I always wondered how we should distinguish between hating AI and hating Al because Al sucks.
No one’s gotten into the actual “why” that I’ve seen. This goes back to the early days of the internet, or even computers, really. In the ’80s and ’90s computer screens were much lower resolution than today. The finer details of traditional typefaces were often lost. There was a big push to simplify and optimize for the screen. This also impacted the early days of the web. I remember the advice for amateurs was to design your pages for small resolutions screens, windows that were only 800x600 or even 640x480, which would work on a standard definition TV.
I remember the defaults in web browsers in the late ’90s were often badly spaced Times New Roman. People would try to code better fonts when they could define them, but they were still largely in the mindset of using fonts optimized for low-resolution screens. Worse, in the early days there were no web fonts that could be imbedded in web pages, so you’d have to try to pick a font likely to be on your readers’ computers, which usually weren’t great.
Nowadays basically everyone’s devices have high-resolution screens, and we have embedded fonts, so we don’t have to live our lives that way. Still, that decades-old advice echoes through in modern designs. And there are a lot of bad free fonts out there, with people unwilling to pay for a font or put in the effort to find a good free one.
As for what you can do? You can’t force everyone to change, but you can be the change you want to see. Encourage people to learn about good typography, which is not just fonts! Make smarter choices in the written work you produce yourself to show others the way. And to get by for now, change the default fonts the devices you use if possible, or individual apps or web browsers. You can even install browser extensions like Stylus to replace a page’s style sheet with a different, better one.
I set Atkinson Hyperlegible as my system font, to solve this and other issues.
https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
Here's how your text renders for me in LibreWolf
Hard agree. Some sans-serif fonts add a slight curve to the lowercase L, which seems like a no-brainer. But that's just me.
Be glad you weren't born a few hundred years ago.
Best I can do is ][
As others have said, sans-serif fonts tend to have this ambiguity, whereas serif fonts don't. I agree it seems like rather a silly design choice, but switching fonts solves the issue. A lot of fonts also make 0 and O hard to tell apart.
I remember when typewriters often didn't have a 1 key. You just used l (lowercase L) instead.
Iller is Swedish for ferret.
Who specifically would you say banned it from the internet?
For the record, less philosophical problems are caused by picking a sans-serif font with a bend on the lowercase L, than that shape for I, where everyone thinks it's a serif, because it sometimes is
IlIlIlIlIl
I think it might be easier to use a serif font. Where are you trying to make this change? At the browser level? OS? Or somewhere else? You should be able to make that change, but the specific configuration will vary.
I think serif fonts have been found to be harder to read.
The English language loves ambiguity. Look at all the words with multiple meanings yet spelled the same way, even though we haven't exhausted all 3-letter word possibilities.
probably because sans serif is literally a lack of features in typography design sense which was a shortsight in computer sense.
Is that Roman numerals for 1?
Il1 while similar they’re typed differently on this site tho (for us atleast)
Your post kinda proves that it's fine because within the context of the rest of the words, everyone could figure out what you were trying to say.
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