David Brin usually writes interesting stuff (although I was horribly disappointed by his most recent Uplift novel). This article is no exception. Unfortunately, it looks hideous. Not only is the entire thing deliberately set in Helvetica Bold, it has medium-blue text on a light-gray background, no leading, and the lines are fully justified (something that’s rarely appropriate on the web).

For more fun, the text is broken up into pseudo-paragraphs by pairs of
tags, something I haven’t seen done in years. The only nice thing I can say about the article, apart from the content, is that the lines would be a comfortable length for reading if he’d used either a few points of leading or a non-bold font.