legibility has 3 questions, while readability has 24. They appear to be covering the same topics, and "readability" is something that I have heard more often in terms of how easy it is to read and understand code (also evidenced by the usage here, being 8 times more common).
asked Nov 14, 2011 at 11:13
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2 Answers
I retagged legibility -> readability and added a first stab at a tag wiki for readability. Feel free to edit it from there.
Thanks for bringing this up!
answered Nov 15, 2011 at 13:52
Legibility != readability
From wikipedia (empasis mine):
Legibility is the degree to which glyphs (individual characters) in text are understandable or recognizable based on appearance.
Legibility is different from readability which refers to entire words, sentences, and paragraphs.
I think we should just retag the legibility questions to readability, as they are all on readability really, and add a wiki summary for legibility to underline the difference.
update: but as Mark notes, a tag wiki may not be the best thing for a tag without questions.
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1Although the words have different meanings in the English language, their context here is the same - how easy is it to read code. One might argue that legibility should include questions about fonts and color schemes while readability is about structure and style, but I don't think there's sufficient need to have two tags for such closely related concepts. It would be better to group them under the same umbrella. Once there are no questions tagged legibility, the tag gets removed in a few days. I'm not sure if having a tag wiki prevents that (I don't think it does, but I can't be sure).– Thomas Owens ModCommented Nov 14, 2011 at 11:53
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1If all the currently-tagged legibility questions are actually readability questions, then retagging is all that's needed. But creating a tag wiki for a tag that has no questions would be a bad thing; the legibility tag will die off after a day, leaving an orphan tag wiki.– user8Commented Nov 14, 2011 at 11:54
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@Mark so just manually retag at some point and let the tag die? It just seems like a good candidate for synonymizing (is that what it's called), since they are similar concepts and I can see some people using one over the other.– Thomas Owens ModCommented Nov 14, 2011 at 19:26
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1@ThomasOwens Legibility and readability aren't the same thing though: they aren't synonyms. If there's a chance in the future that there would be questions about one and not the other, creating a synonym would be harmful. There have only been 3 questions that have been tagged with legibility: let's let the tag die and if it comes up again, we can see whether a synonym makes sense.– user8Commented Nov 14, 2011 at 19:30
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@Mark If you post your two comments as an answer, I can accept to denote the "right thing to do", if you want.– Thomas Owens ModCommented Nov 15, 2011 at 12:58