Lack of knowledge only offends pedants, and even then, I think they secretly thrill off of it.

http://digitalcollections.lib.ucf.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/IST&CISOPTR=26301&CISOMODE=print

This brings up the 1975 Naval report by Kincaid and others. Also wtf .exe in a URL? Not a programmer, so moving on.

It appears as though it was arrived at experimentally, ie by testing subjects, rather than theoretically. That's not uncommon at all for statistics, as from what I understand, it's a fairly new field (think about oldoldold mathematicians and who sponsored their jetset mathematical lifestyle, and think about those sponsors' opinions about free will and gambling.)

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~nenkova/papers/revisitingReadability.pdf

appears to be a more modern take on the subject, with references as late as 2008, and more modern notation (attached is a pretty self-explanatory example of the notation, though it's still pretty dense in the text, but not inaccessible.)

Personally, I can't do anything but skim texts on a screen. I might print these out and read them though, it's a pretty interesting topic.

>>131
oops, in (2) in the attached pic, there should be an i just like in (1).

>>131

The .exe is a program generating the page. Think of it like .php, .asp, .pl, etc. The web server runs the program with the parameters of the URL as its input and presents its output as a web page.

>>136
Yeah, I'm familiar with that, I guess I've just never seen pages generated by an .exe