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From time to time I see questions or answers in which the poster has used something other than regular font size. This can look absolutely appalling. e.g. Stop an already running cron job

Can the CSS please be adjusted so that such posts don't look like someone screaming at the top of their lungs?

Edit:

Mark's comments regarding the sample I linked are perfectly correct but sometimes people

use the H1 tag

which looks every bit as bad.

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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This is because they didn't mark their code as "code", and a # at the beginning of the line is a markup for

Inappropriately large headings

I don't think most people use the # functionality, because 1) I don't think they know it exists, and 2) It looks dicky (what's wrong with bold for headings?)

Anyway, if you see that, you can edit the text and code-format it (or wrap it in <pre> tags) and it's all good.

3

Perhaps the # prefix could be changed from

the current h1 heading style

to

a slightly less obnoxious h2 style

or even

A spartan h3 heading

Heck, it shouldn't be too hard to just set the style for all headings to H2 or H3 within the question/answer section

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  • 1
    Better yet, have neither the # prefix or the <Hn> tags rendered in questions and answers.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented May 25, 2011 at 21:31
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    I'm not so sure. Used properly, they can really add to the readability. This is especially true with some of the longer questions/answers.
    – Hyppy
    Commented May 25, 2011 at 22:52
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    It is too bad that 90-95% of the time I see them use, they are being used badly.
    – Zoredache
    Commented May 25, 2011 at 23:31
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    Whether used properly or improperly they render far too large and just look like screaming.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented May 26, 2011 at 1:51
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I completely agree that the rendering of h1 and other heading tags in questions and answers is massively inappropriate. However it might be worth suggesting that the bad rendering is a clue and strong incentive to edit the post to fix the markup. If the effects of using the wrong markup were more subtle, the formatting would not get fixed by editors nearly as often.

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  • Ah yes, but if the formatting didn't look bad enough to prompt people to edit it, wouldn't that also mean the appearance is acceptable and therefor not needing to be fixed? Oddly enough, few of us are on the site just to edit other people's posts, so if this sort of thing was made a non-issue it could only be good for the site.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented May 26, 2011 at 10:06
  • Acceptable appearances is not the only end goal. Having the data correctly formatted also has structural components not just visual, and the data from stack exchange sites is processed and displayed many more places than just the main site with one stylesheet.
    – Caleb
    Commented May 26, 2011 at 10:11

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