There are many things that puzzle me about common web design. One ofthe biggest thing is this: why do so many sites reduce the font sizeof their main content? This is the single largest readability problemthat I run into on the web. (For some reason this seems to be especiallyprevalent on blogs.)

I see it over and over again, in CSS like 'font-size:small', 'font-size: 80%', 'font: normal 76%/

I could talk about aesthetics; I could talk about line noise andreadability; but for me it ultimately comes down to one thing: datastructures.

Namely, I find it very hard to write perl code of any depth withoutrunning headlong into the fact that Perl's 'collection' types (arraysand hashes) can't contain themselves. All they can contain is scalars(strings, numbers, and references).

For example, recently I was writing a program to mass-query the SBLDNS blocklist