Does StackExchange’s establishment hate typography? [closed]

Question

Possibly some of you read Wikipedia. We can’t say it is designed professionally, but (in such its parts as en.wikipedia.org, de.wikipedia.org and ru.wikipedia.org) community treats typography with respect. Such things as “dash”, “arrow symbols”, “degree sign” (°), and “serif vs sans-serif” font faces belong to the common knowledge. Not only have these sites lengthy manuals of style about typography, but MediaWiki software offers a drop-down menu with non-ASCII characters, as well as there are numerous templates (things written in the code as {{…}}) that show correct typography in the rendered HTML page.

At StackExchange sites, typography is almost non-existent. Most sites use sans-serif for text exclusively, although some use serif and there is not evident who and why made such decisions. Except for my own posts, I didn’t see any “→”, any “ × ”, any “ ° ”, only ASCII surrogates or clumsy MathJax emulation. It is almost impossible to see a dash character (“–” or “—”) at StackExchange except in some CMS templated messages. Even here, at meta.graphicdesign.SE, I didn’t see a single dash in posts but in Aarthi’s ones (that in turn use em dashes, that are idiosyncratic for English language).

What happened when I tried to discuss a part of this problem at meta.stackexchange.com? You probably guessed: they simply deride my grievances.

Are typography geeks here? Do you hear me? If you do, then, please, share your typography-related histories about StackExchange. How did you try to enhance Markdown or deploy a script that helps to insert useful symbols. How, possibly, isolated establishment members tried to improve things but were turned down.

Answer 1

In one of my recent answers: Achieve this effect: Glowing outline of a photograph from 2 days ago, prior to your posting this:

So get to it by Filter → Filter Gallery → Stylize → Glowing Edges

So, I'm not sure how much reading you've done to determine that you, and you alone, are champion of symbols. Of course you're also distinguishing "I" for some odd reason. I'm guessing you believe to be using the single quote when instead you're using the Grave Accent, so I wouldn't be pointing too many fingers. (I'm not sure why you'd be single quoting it either) [woops forgot the period, oh well]

Language and Graphic Design are about effectively communicating ideas. The ends justify the means, not the other way around. If one person wants to use → and another wants to just write, "then" as long as the point is made then both people were successful.