jonathan michaels wrote:
On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 11:43:21PM -0700, Jason C. Wells wrote:
spellberg_robert wrote:
when your content is sound,
the presentation will take care of itself.
/me hands Rob a paragraph and some upper case letters.
I'm sorry. I found it far too difficult to read your content. The poor
presentation required more effort than I was willing to invest.
well, perhaps, now you might know how i feel about trying to may my way
throught the way you
all write and present you posts. i struggel to read the majority of
posts .. not everybody read writes presents american english in teh way
"some" americans read write and present thier version of english.
You may struggle with the way we all write and present our posts. I'm
sure that will improve with time and learning. But if you struggle with
the most basic of the rules of grammar and language, the solution is not
to ignore the grammar and language.
this world is made up of people whole read, write and
understand/comprehend at various and different levels of competence for
whatever levels of comptance are available in these days of politically
corrected school marking systems.
To be sure. But deliberately avoiding the most simple rules does not
aid communication. I should target my content to the level of the
audience. My presentation should be correct _also_.
we all use the 'lingua franca' at different levels of usability for all
and different levels of competance for all and various differnt levels
of the 'human' condition. my bodies uniqunesses help me see thes
'different levels' i write the way that i write because this is how
best that i can see (as in visual acuity, as well as frontal cortex
issues both learning) and understanding.
Wow! That sure sounds fancy. Can your frontal cortex and visual acuity
discern the shift key once in thirty keystrokes? But even your
presentation is vastly superior to Rob's in that your paragraphs are at
least paragraphs. That alone significantly aids communication.
In fact, the reason that my reply to you is lengthy is a testament to
the fact that your communication was more effective. Mind you, your
presentation is not as I would have it be. But it is good enough that I
don't have to struggle to comprehend you.
at any rate this is how i see it and perhaps if we all (me included)
spent more time understanding why people write the way that they might
write rather than HOW they might write .. content is far, far more important
than the presentation of that content.
Do you suppose after 5,000 years of humans putting chisel to stone and
pen to paper that we don't understand how people should write? We do.
That's where grammar and language came from. Presentation elements are
a critical part of that.
Consider writing right to left. Consider writing bottom to top. These
are merely presentational elements. In the context of a specific
language it is quite important to write in the prescribed manner.
(Hmmm, it just occured to me that an HTML renderer should be able to
morph the directionality of language per CSS.)
I won't disagree that content is more important. Presentation is about
ease of use. Presentation is the ergonomics of the prose. And since
good presentation is incredibly much more simple to attain than good
content, one ought to put forth the very slight effort needed to achieve
good presentation.
And what's more. If you are e.e. cummings or Pablo Picasso than feel
free to present as you see fit. All others, please color between the lines.
disabled, people, with english as a sencond language and a whole lot of
stuff that is people in between ... sitting at our keyboards we can
foreget that teh stuff out there is another person, a person not a
machine providing content for our own consumption for our benefit.
If an author writes to an audience and that author is not writing for
the audience's benefit, then what on Earth are they doing? Even now,
while I try to persuade the FreeBSD audience, including yourself and
Rob, that presentation is also important, I do so because I perceive
there is a benefit to the audience. I may be wrong, but that is for the
audience to decide.
if this is how we treat people then it dosen't matter how good freebsd,
is.
The topic at hand was content versus presentation. The chief point was
that presentation is also important to effective communication. My
response was terse, but it was not ad hominem.
going to be .. it dosent matter if when they come here to get help
Let's get the context correct here. Rob wasn't asking for help. He was
pontificating on a topic of presentation, all while using horrendous
presentation. I disagreed with his premise. I provided a case in point
as rebuttal. Presentation doesn't work itself out.
support and or information we treat tehm like grist for the mill,
anotehr machine for teh provision off our content, our content, my
content, is it worth it .. i ask this question every time i see this
"you didn't provide _my_content_ " in the way that I want it to be
provided, in teh way that it mkes it easy for me to use in teh way that
i want to use it.
Can you imagine how difficult it would be to read the FreeBSD handbook
if every person who wanted to contribute content did so in a different
presentation?
I really think that you haven't thought this through very well. And as
far as your claim about the selfishness of people wanting "their
content" in "their way" I would advise you to consider that the audience
and their considerations are vastly more important than the author's.
The author should tune his content and his presentation to suit the
needs of the audience.
put another way, "dr suess" has a lot to answer for in teh creation of
.. this the "me" generation don't ya think ??
No. Not at all. "I like green eggs and ham. Sam I am." You've twisted
a narrow topic of content versus presentation into a broad criticism of
all society's selfishness. Don't see the irony in your very own argument?
I'm fairly certain that the larger share of the FreeBSD community and
especially those engaged in the production of content do see the value
of using consistent presentation, format, and tools. Why did I choose
to expound to today? Now that I'm done I'm left scratching my head.
At least Rob did recognize that "my target audience gets to decide for
themselves." One of the things the target audience may decide is, this
content is to hard to understand, given it's presentation. We all
should be mindful of this.
Regards,
Jason
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