Tom Holub wrote:
>On Sun, Aug 06, 2000 at 05:58:29PM -0400, Tom Neff wrote:
>> Certainly most of the B/STRONG/EM/IMG/FONT sorts of tags are just window
>> dressing that don't add anything to the information a FAQ imparts.
>
> This is just silly; certainly if you define your parameters such that
> the only "important" information is information that can easily be
> transmitted by plain text, plain text is fine. I could just as easily
> say that punctiuation "doesn't add anything to the information a sentence
> imparts", since a comma is "meta-information" about the sentence, rather
> than direct information about the subject.
Okay, point taken. (But note that Tom Neff said "most", not "all".)
> I really don't care what your personal preference is for seeing URL's.
> I personally much prefer hyper-links.
He says, she says. We'll never settle anything that way.
> I think it's pretty obvious that the vast bulk of the net user
> population prefers hyperlinks...
This is equally silly. Certainly if you define "the net user
population" as "the population that uses HTML web browsers", the
stated preference for hot-clickable hyperlinks is vacuously true.
But the whole point of the "don't use gratuitous markup" argument
is to avoid disenfranchising that segment of the net user
population which, for whatever reason, does not have access to a
web browser, or does not have HTTP access to a properly HTMLified
rendition of a particular document.
>> I understand the desire to create one's own beautiful publication.
>> But I suggest that the needs of the community relying on each FAQ should
>> be paramount. Getting the information to as many of them as possible,
>> in the clearest possible format, should be the top priority.
>
> Your point here seems to be that I should make sure that my FAQ is
> formatted not for the typical audience, that is, net users on
> computers, but instead for the pathological case of someone who
> decides to, instead of clicking on a link, instead print out the page
> and type the URL in later. Really that's too ridiculous to respond
> to.
No, that's the extreme or limiting case of his point. Nobody is
saying that everyone needs to bend over maximally far backwards
to accommodate every pathological reader. The point is that
people shouldn't bend over maximally far forwards, either:
content creators shouldn't go out of their way to use every
cutting-edge feature at every opportunity, resulting in documents
which are optimized for one particular kind of reader and useless
to the rest. There's a whole spectrum of possibilities in
between.
(And please don't focus on just the <B>/<I>/<UL> issue, or the
hyperlink-versus-URL issue. Those are just examples; the real
issue here is plain versus specialized text, in general.)
> I'm not going to get drawn into this argument, as there are too many
> people with personal identity tied up in the way the net worked in
> 1992 (my own first Usenet posting was in 1986).
I'm not going to get drawn into a "who posted first?" tug-of-war,
but I would like to point out that just because an idea is old,
doesn't mean that it's obsolete. The universality of plain-text
formats is still very real and (in some circumstances, at least)
vitally important.
* * *
The whole argument here is, of course, an unwinnable one.
Despite my rhetorical potshot above, it is almost certainly true
that the majority of people who have access to the net today do
have access to a web browser and do in fact prefer HTML-formatted
web pages to other forms of content. Therefore, the majority
of content creators (and, today, this may end up including the
majority of FAQ list maintainers as well) will choose to create
their content in HTML. That's a fact which curmudgeons must
grudgingly accept, but it's equally a fact that when a curmudgeon
sees some piece of content gratuitously marked up, content which
would serve its purpose equally well if rendered as plain text,
content which would be more widely accessible (and therefore
serve its purpose even better) if rendered as plain text, that
curmudgeon is going to bemoan the gratuitous markup, perhaps
publicly. And this is a fact that everyone else is going to
have to accept.
So, let's call a truce. If you prefer plain text, and you
observe something that's not, feel free to criticize it for
not being plain text, but don't presume that it's utterly
unacceptable for it not to be plain text, and don't be
surprised if your criticism falls on deaf or unresponsive ears.
If you're someone who likes to use the latest and greatest markup
techniques, and if someone criticizes you because your marked-up
text is not universally readable, understand that the criticism
is a valid one, which you may nevertheless decline to act on.
Don't bother to criticize the curmudgeon for being one, or to
assert that "the overwhelming majority" of people can read your
cutting-edge markup anyway. The curmudgeon already knows he is
one, and the assertion about the majority (even if it's true)
only pours gasoline on the fire. Precisely what the curmudgeon
is lamenting is the effective disenfranchisement of those readers
who (for whatever reason) can't or won't keep up with cutting
edge tools. The fact that those readers are in the minority
doesn't mean that it's not a shame that we're being
disenfranchised.
Steve Summit
scs@eskimo.com
-- Programming Challenge #6: Don't just fix the bug. See http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/challenge/.
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