Buried Headlines Whose idea was it to use headlines at the starts of paragraphs with no punctuation or clear visual way of separating it from the body text? They do it on metafilter and cursor.org. I hope this doesn't catch on. It's annoying. It's not a big deal when they omit headlines like memepool or kottke.org or lots of other blogs, but to throw them up at the start of a paragraph and expect readers to take it as a headline just because it's a link simply doesn't work.

I suppose people complained the same way about words and titles and taglines that run together without spaces, like http://itickledanncoulterinthearmpitfirmly.blogspot.com. Now omitting spaces pervades advertising and graphic design. But you can adjust to that fairly quickly, especially when you get a daily barage of it for a few years. I hope this new bloggy style of poorly differentiated headlines will not have to grow on us. It doesn't look like a cute, stylish new way of doing headlines. It looks like a failure to understand visual design and the ingrained habits of readers.