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)
