Flexibility by Jeremy Keith

Jeremy quoting from and commenting on the new book Flexible Typesetting from A List Apart.

It appears the book nods to the materiality of creating things for the web. Specifically, typography on the web should honor and respect the nature of its medium, which tends towards design being a suggestion, not a mandate. Here’s a quote from the book:

Of course typography is valuable. Typography may now be optional [on the web], but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Typographic choices contribute to a text’s meaning. But on the web, text itself (including its structural markup) matters most, and presentational instructions like typography take a back seat. Text loads first; typography comes later. Readers are free to ignore typographic suggestions, and often prefer to. Services like Instapaper, Pocket, and Safari’s Reader View are popular partly because readers like their text the way they like it

As the author states, “Readers [on the web] are typographers, too.”