Tomas Hajny wrote:
On Fri, March 8, 2013 17:04, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
Also, there as no specific person I targeted in
fpc-devel. Almost all posts lately contain about 95% quoted text! How
does a moderator fail to see this?
I really don't want to prolong this and perhaps upset more people than
necessary, but has it occurred to you that that's how mailing lists work
and that possibly your expectations are unreasonable?
.
.
Just to add another view (to show that it is not a fight among two clearly
delineated camps):
..
Points noted and generally agreed.
- I do not share the opinion of Mark that sending URLs should be
considered inappropriate or that senders willing to share some link with
others ought to spend time on creating different (shorter) URLs in cases
like this (and from this point of view I don't see anything wrong on
Graeme's original post).
I didn't say it was inappropriate, I said that providing a TinyURL
alternative would have helped people who- for some reason or other-
couldn't cut-and-paste the full one. This is particularly the case for
YouTube, which typically demands a fairly recent browser/Flash
combination which might not be present on somebody's primary work
computer. In the current case, Google doesn't throw up a link to that
video on trivial searches (and more credit to Graham for finding and
sharing it as a result) but there's no way that I- for one- am going to
start trying to transcribe the entire URL to the laptop next to my main
system during work hours: I've got much more important things to do.
Of course, simply putting up a TinyURL without explanation is at least
as bad as posting a long URL which risks attracting enforced line
breaks: I don't know about anybody else, but I'm blowed if I'm going to
click on every URL I'm given whatever my level of safeguards :-) The
ideal- and this is a convention that I'm used to from a private
conferencing system I use- is to post the original URL, the TinyURL
equivalent, and a very brief description... I was going to give an
example from XKCD but I see that that already uses concise URLs,
possibly because the artist has a clue.
So again, to avoid any possible doubt: I am not complaining about URLs
in the general case. I /am/ complaining, politely as a non-moderator,
about the assumption that a URL embedded in a mailing list message is
appropriate or intelligible, although it's clearly not as bad as an
animated GIF in somebody's sig.
And finally- and this one's for you Graeme- I wouldn't be complaining
about the URL being less than useful if I hadn't made a minimal attempt
to view it, on the basis that you're not a total idiot and might be
making an interesting or at least amusing point.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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