Sometimes I wish Mark hadn't published those articles. They have taken on a kind of cult status, like the interview with 37 Signals about their A/B testing and the words "See plans and pricing". Now lots of people seem to be taking these specific practices as gospel, but they've missed the point: it's not that what works for someone else will necessarily work for you, but that some things can be changed that might not have occurred to you, perhaps yielding much better results. <obligatory> Also, just because 37 Signals and Mark Boulton have popular blogs, that doesn't actually prove them right. </obligatory>
Mark's web site doesn't seem to have comments there any more, but I'm pretty sure I left one at the time pointing out that you want a typeset list to have a clear break between items (otherwise why are you typesetting it as a list?) and therefore hanging list markers the way you might hang punctuation seems exactly the opposite to what you are trying to achieve.
I would argue that the same series of articles makes the same mistake with hanging quotation marks, for the same reason. If you read some of the early thinking about hanging punctuation, the goal of this kind of microtypography was to give visually clean lines to the edges of where text is justified. If you position glyphs mechanically, as computer typesetting inevitably does by default, you actually get a visually uneven margin where you have glyphs that "stick out", such as quotation marks, dashes, and the crossbar on a captial T: the whitespace above and/or below the "sticking out" part breaks the straightness of the margin to a human eye. Instead, you can hang the glyph slightly (not necessarily entirely) in the margin, to give a line that is mathematically irregular but visually straight to the human eye.
Somehow this idea has transformed into hanging glyphs, usually punctuation marks, being some sort of trendy typographical effect, which might still make sense if you're talking about setting displayed type such as pull quotes. Unfortunately, it has then crossed a bridge too far, becoming "this is the Right Way To Do It(TM)" for even regular text, which is just dogma without any sort of aesthetic and/or usability justification.
Mark's web site doesn't seem to have comments there any more, but I'm pretty sure I left one at the time pointing out that you want a typeset list to have a clear break between items (otherwise why are you typesetting it as a list?) and therefore hanging list markers the way you might hang punctuation seems exactly the opposite to what you are trying to achieve.
I would argue that the same series of articles makes the same mistake with hanging quotation marks, for the same reason. If you read some of the early thinking about hanging punctuation, the goal of this kind of microtypography was to give visually clean lines to the edges of where text is justified. If you position glyphs mechanically, as computer typesetting inevitably does by default, you actually get a visually uneven margin where you have glyphs that "stick out", such as quotation marks, dashes, and the crossbar on a captial T: the whitespace above and/or below the "sticking out" part breaks the straightness of the margin to a human eye. Instead, you can hang the glyph slightly (not necessarily entirely) in the margin, to give a line that is mathematically irregular but visually straight to the human eye.
Somehow this idea has transformed into hanging glyphs, usually punctuation marks, being some sort of trendy typographical effect, which might still make sense if you're talking about setting displayed type such as pull quotes. Unfortunately, it has then crossed a bridge too far, becoming "this is the Right Way To Do It(TM)" for even regular text, which is just dogma without any sort of aesthetic and/or usability justification.