How is it a great convention? I'm not trying to be contentious, however I am not sure how that is superior to underlining a link, which is a fairly ubiquitous convention. It seems overly cumbersome. It made me think though that perhaps a superscript would serve the same purpose and be less intrusive.
I liked it, if only because it made the text look much more uniform. I imagine it was done out of objection to the "make the link bold and blue and underlined and very different" ethos that even Google was into until recently. With this, I can just read, and if I see a diamond, I know a mouseover will reveal the anchor text and point me toward whether I want to click on the thing or not.
except that mouse over isn't really a thing in all browsers since the advent of mobile browsing.. so it seems his own style choices constrain users freedoms (ironic, isn't that more or less the underlying theme of the rant? enforcing a style choices reduces freedom without providing value? oops)
Except for internal links are indicated by small caps.
I find both of these conventions very irritating. If you want to be edgy with your link styling, I find Wired's use of a thick, light underline (e.g. http://www.wired.com/2015/02/microsoft-third-party-cloud-ser...) to be both pleasant and not confusing.
I agree with mryingster; what happened to underlines, which are a well understood convention as well as directly showing which words serve as the link?
It's a horrible and distracting convention. Made the entire site distracting and I gave up trying to read halfway through, only to find people talking in HN about... the diamonds. :-)
The diamonds are too big. I think this convention could work if the diamonds weren't the height of the line. Maybe at 50% or 30% of the original size. Then it would be obvious but not nearly so distracting.
As it is, it's fairly ugly and breaks the text unpleasantly.
