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Re: Removing the ASCII Art

From: Daniel Stenberg via curl-library <curl-library_at_cool.haxx.se>
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2021 00:58:12 +0200 (CEST)

On Tue, 30 Mar 2021, Emil Engler via curl-library wrote:

> Also ASCII arts disadvantages are much bigger than it's advantages which is
> only to look kind-of nice and eye-catching.

I agree that the ASCII art doesn't fill any practical purpose. But I'm still
hesitant to remove it! I think primarily because of two reasons that are
related to each other:

  - the ASCII art makes the header look nice and unique in some ways, which
makes it "stand out"

  - I feel nostalgic about them since they have been there since day 1 of the
curl project's life-time

Admittedly, these are not very strong reasons.

> The major disadvantages are:
> * Hard/Complex use of grep

*All* comments make greps hard to use on source code. I've not had a problem
with the headers but I've often worked around grep triggers in comments. I
don't think that's a very strong argument against the comments, but more of an
encouragement to write better grep commands! Removing the ASCII art will not
outlaw those characters from being present in other comments.

> * Hard for people who use screen readers

I'm not sure I buy that unless someone who's trying to develop curl using a
screen reader tells me they actually hamper them.

Surely people with screen readers will jump over source code header anyway
since nobody would want that license-blurb read out loud more than at most
just once anyway.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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Received on 2021-04-02