# > 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 tend to prefer a hyperlink the text of which is the URL in
question. In an HTML document, that is. Of course, I'd
generally rather read plain text than HTML, but I think that
touches on what follows...
# > 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.
Usenet FAQs, on the whole, are aimed at an audience of people
who read usenet. I'm sure most of them also use the web, but
pretty much all of them read usenet, so they're familiar with
a text-only medium. Most computer users know about the web.
Only a small percentage know about or ever read usenet. Having
said that, I HTMLified my FAQ a while back and have maintained
it in HTML since. I use an automatic converter to produce the
text-only version for posting. The text-only version contains
(pretty early IIRC) the URL for the HTML version, which is always
the newest version. The HTML version is posted on the web,
of course. Naturally, I think this policy makes sense.
# 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.
It's not hard to produce multiple distribution versions from
one original. IMO it makes good sense to distribute an HTML
version by http and distribute a pure ASCII version by nntp.
# (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.)
If we were talking about posting HTML to usenet (which we
may not be; I was unsubbed and may have missed some things)
the real issue would be huge amounts of human-unreadable
information in the form of an HTML header, superfluous
table tags, and so on and so forth. A barebones
hand-produced HTML document that is human-readable would
be a lot more acceptable than something designed in one
of those GUI-WYSIWYG HTML-editors, for example. I would
never promote that on usenet because most people have no
discretion, but if you use your head you could avoid the
worst effects of most HTML posts.
# The curmudgeon already knows he is
# one, and the assertion about the majority (even if it's true)
# only pours gasoline on the fire.
Most curmudgeons who complain about superfluous markup
probably have a browser around, often several. We just
*prefer* plain text because we don't have to *mess* with
a browser. Browsers, even w3, are krufty kludges that
are difficult to use compared to, say, a good text editor.
Especially when it takes extra keystrokes to divest a
document of the author's particularly annoying choice of
colours. (The guy who first decided to start making web
pages with blinding white backgrounds should be shot first,
then whipped to death with thin coax.) We are aware
that most people are not sufficiently adept with a
keyboard that it makes any difference, but we're also
aware that most people do not have sufficiently good
taste (and cooking skill) that the difference between
real food made at home and take-out makes any difference.
That doesn't make us want to eat burgers and fries
three meals a day.
# 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.
I don't think cutting-edge is the real issue for most.
Some perhaps. I think the real issue is convenience
and comfort. I can use my favourite reader, whatever
that happens to be, to read plain text, because just
about every program that deals with text of any kind
understands ASCII. (Don't talk to me about EBCDIC.
I like to pretend that has gone completely away.)
With a format like HTML the options are a lot more
limited unless I want to convert each individual
document. I now have to use a browser specifically,
unless I care to wade through a lot of extraneous
<tr><td> </td></tr> stuff. (The guy who created
the first WYSIWYG HTML editor should be taken to
Amundsen-Scott and forced to participate in the
300-club initiation ceremony every hour on the hour
until such time as he either repents or is dead.)
# The fact that those readers are in the minority
# doesn't mean that it's not a shame that we're being
# disenfranchised.
Se la vi.
-- jonadab
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