All analogies suck.

[tyggerjai]

SO let me step for a moment into concrete examples, and also clarify what I'm *not* saying.


*I* want my friends page in all its glory, long articles and pictures and all. To get that, I pay the price of the odd webtest. In an ideal world, my client would show me pictures and long articles, and hide the webtests. Madi's would, perhaps, hide all the pictures and auto-insert a "more ..." link after five lines of posts. But that's all very much client dependent.And that's where it *should* be. Web pages give clients hints about hwo to display a page. The display is then up to the client. So what's deficient here is not the writer of the LJ page. They're presenting it the way they want it presented, and they have that right. The deficiency is in the client. There are about a zillion LJ clients out there. There are Perl libraries to build your own. They run on anything from WAP phones to terminals to Windows PC desktop apps to web browsers. And each of those clients deals with data differently. And that's *exactly* the way it should be.

Adding a "cut" link doesn't, actually, prevent me from writing a client that will stitch the post together and show it as one long one. Leaving it out doesn't prevent Madi from writing a client that snips and inserts a "show more" link. The problem isn't the *data*, it's the client. I'm very much of the view that data should just be data. There's no *actual* difference between the text before the cut and the text after it, in presentation terms, except either an arbitrary "this is long enough", or a slightly more relevant shift in context.Pictures are different - they are not text. But they're already *flagged* as different - they have a stonking big <img> tag around them . They're marked - for your *client* to do with as it will. Or as you've told it to.

Should there be standards, so clients *do* know what to do with it? Yes, it's called XHTML. Should those standards be used for arbitrary "You may or may not want to see this data so I'm hiding it" at the *data* end? No. Data should have as little information as possible. That's good, polite, webdesign. I the designer shouldn't be saying "Cut here". I should just be giving your client a hunk-o-data, and saying "There. Go sick." SO the <lj-cut> tag is there to compensate for a suboptimal client for some people who think the *data* should be responsible for dictating layout, not the client.

So yeah, that to my mind, as a web developer, is the very *heart* of Netiquette - allowing my client to access your data in a way conveniant to *me*. And things like lj-cut tags are Bad and Wrong because they impose some arbitrary format on the client.

Sometimes it's not arbitrary - sometimes the lj-cut tag can be used well when the *designer* wishes to cut. But that should be a design decision, not an "oh, people are gonna bitch about this" or an "Oh, people can't set their client properly" decision.

That, I think, is why I get worked up about this. Because the whole "politeness" debate turns "I want to read your page like this" into "You should set your page out like this".

It's attempting to impose the limitations of your client and your personal preferences on someone else.

Having said all of which, given that the default livejournal.com/~foo/friends wb client is the most popular client, especially among our group, in the context of that secific client, should the designer design "for" that client, by using lj-cut on long posts, and for images?

Maybe. Maybe not.

jwz and drood. I was mentioning these to kitling earlier as classic examples of exceptions to the rules of "lj-cut is more polite and convenient."

When *I* read my friends page (actually, my friendsfriends, but same diff), I look forward to droods long rambling posts. I don't *want* to have to click on an LJ cut tag to get the rest of it. I want it all there, in it's natural glory, so I can just read and read and read. Jamie Zawinskies constant posting of pictures is the same deal - I *want* them right there. On my friends page, in my face, so I don't have to hunting through links to get them. Because they're funny, they're clever, they're thought-provoking, they're worthwhile. To *me*. So to my mind, it's "rude" to make me go clicking on links to see stuff I'll almost certainly want to see. I've already gone to all the damn effort of adding you to my friends page. I *want* to hear what you have to say. So say it, don't go messing me around with lj-cut tags.

You're adding levels of effort to get to information I've already signed up for! That's not "polite", or "good design".
That's downright silly.
I want it. I want your info! Give it to me, it's why I *put* you on my frinds page.

If I *didn't* want to know which cosmic unicorn you were, I wouldn't have added you to my friends page!
Am I interested in *everything* you have to say? No. Is it *your* job to determine what I will and won't want to read ? No!

So that's my stance.
Inadequate clients and a very far from universal agreement on what is and isn't "polite", or "acceptable". Get a better client. Take me off your friends page. But don't for a moment imagine that your idea of "rude" is the same as mine, and don't for a moment tell me how I should be formatting my posts. Ask me, and point out that if I keep posting my way, you'll stop reading me. But don't call me rude, and take some higher moral ground just because I don't consider *your* reading style the most important factor in my posting style.

sol.
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Comments

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

SO the tag is there to compensate for a suboptimal client for some people who think the *data* should be responsible for dictating layout, not the client.

Can't have it both ways; if (as you point out) there's the option of using a client that overrides the lj-cut tag, then it's not "dictating" layout, only suggesting it.

Implementation vs concept.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Oh sure, but since we started out with some shibolleth of "good" design, lj-cut is a *display* tag, in its present implementation, and modern "good design" says html isn't about display, it's about markup.

It should be <abstract> and <body>, or <intro> and <further>

and then, *as a designer*, you can make the decision based on actual content and it's *meaning*, not some arbitrary limit of the client or reader.

But lj-cut isn't a "meaning" or "content" tag, it's a "um, this is probably too long, so I'm cutting it at the nearest convenient point", and from "good design" terms, that's an utter nono.

It doesn't "dictate" to me, no, I can write a client that ignores it. But good design theory says I shouldn't have to ignore it, and I certainly shouldn't have to go out of my way to work around it.

The real problem is that lj-cut is an LJ idea, implemented in HTML, and it's using HTML as an ugly kludge to pander to arguably broken clients by imposing crufty arbitrary structure, unrealted to actual content, on the *designer*. What the LJ cut tag means is that when I request livejournal.com/~lederhosen, I should get *all* the data you as a designer consider relevant, not all the data you think my client will be able to handle or I might want to see. I shouldn't have to make two requests in order to decide *how* to display that data, unless you as a designer see that as a design imperative. And the use of lj-cut being discussed here is about using it to pander arbitrarily to someone elses broken client or personal preferences. Fuck em. If I request a page, I want that page *as designed*, and then I'll make decisions about how to render it. I can write a wap phone that ignores "Hey, this should be RED AND FLASHING" tags, but I shouldn't have to - the document should say "This data is of this type, render it how you will."

So if lj-cut means "I the designer choose to hide this information for my purposes", then that's fine. What's being said here is that it should be used to say "I the designer have to hide this away because some people don't want to see it, and some clients don't deal with long text very well, and it has nothing to do with what I'm trying to say or how I *want* to say it." And that's Ungood.

sol.
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Re: Implementation vs concept.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

But lj-cut isn't a "meaning" or "content" tag, it's a "um, this is probably too long, so I'm cutting it at the nearest convenient point", and from "good design" terms, that's an utter nono.

Actually, it often does serve as a de facto content tag (if we mean the same thing by 'content tag', which we probably don't, but anyway...)

I'll occasionally use LJ-cut for length, but just as often I use it to identify content that some of my friends might not want to read. (Because while in theory anything that bothers them is their own fault for reading my LJ, in practice, I am not an entirely predictable person and if they could read my mind, they wouldn't bother with my LJ anyway.)

I most often use LJ to flag heavily negative posts (rants about work, etc), so people who don't want to hear me angsting about petty frustrations don't have to; occasionally I'll use it when discussing sex/religion/politics etc, because it gives people more flexibility about which things they read at the cost of two extra clicks. Given the range of people following my LJ, and my inability to predict their squickability, this seems like a good tradeoff to me.

What the LJ cut tag means is that when I request livejournal.com/~lederhosen, I should get *all* the data you as a designer consider relevant, not all the data you think my client will be able to handle or I might want to see.

I don't view lj-cut as limiting the data you get; I see it as adding a confirmation step. "This stuff is probably not of interest to you, but if you want to see it anyway just click."

When I read my friends' LJs, I tend to read all the cut stuff - once. The good thing about lj-cut is that having read each cut *once*, I can then skim over the "friends" page, looking to see if anybody's commented, without wading through the longer stuff again. Yes, there are other ways of achieving this end, but lj-cut is handy and seems to work for most people. Show me a better alternative, and I'll consider it :-

Re: Implementation vs concept.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Right. So these are the kind of design or authorial decisions where it's a good thing.
You the author, taking into account your audience, are using it to flag different areas of content.

That's ok. The original question was largely "long posts" (whatever they are) that should be limited for the readers sake, and pictures, and webtests, etc.

So sure, it does get used as a "here be dragons" content tag, or whatever, and that's not a bad idea when you enter the post, but when I come along to read it, it means I do have to make two requests to get all the data, when really I should only have to make one. Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but clicking on an LJ cut link, as far as I can see, expands *all* the lj-cuts in a post. That again seems suboptimal. And I-the-user don't have a way of saying "Show me text that's hidden by a cut but not images".

So no, it can be used well, insofar as the protocols allow, and I'm saying that it's fine in that context (though still not an optimal solution). what I'm objecting to is the idea that people who don't use it on long posts are evil, or that it's always appropriate, or whatever.
If you as a designer find that it stuuis your purpose, then hey, more power to you.

From an implementation point of view, the lj-cut tag does limit the data my client gets - that's *exactly* what it does. The confirmation should be client side, and done by a client that has al lthe data. We're well into "Why webpages suck as interfaces for this", but what *should* happen is that I should be able to tell my client "Show all cut content" or "prompt to show cut content", and the lj-cut doesn;t allow that - it makes my client go away and grab the cut data as a second operation. And unless you flag it in the cut tag, how does my client know whether it's text (which I might want always to see) or an image(which I don't want to see) until I have gone and downloaded it? If you just use existing img tags, then my client *does* know, and the cutting is taken care of at my end.

So yes, broken though it is, the lj-cut can be used to flag "emotional content", or whatever. And that's all fine - there are better ways of doing it, but if we're talking the humble lj default web client, it's hard to think of a better one for that design purpose. And that's fine - it's not optimal, but it works, and I have no issue with that. What I have issue with is this idea that authors should use it because their audience say so, ad that there's some arbitrary number of lines after which it's "polite" to use it, or that it's "polite" to use it automatically for webtests or pictures.

It's up to the *designer*. So a a design tool, it's still b0rken, but as you say, it's better than nothing for communicating "New thought, this may not interest you". What it *shouldn't* be used as is a tool for a reader to put pressure on a designer to have arbitrary cuts that the designer didn't want to put in.
But yeah, it's a tool for designers. What I object to is readers saying " I want to see it like this", when that's at odds with how the designer wants to present it, and using lj-cut as a whip to beat designers for being "rude" for posting things that are too long or not the type of content I want to see or whatever.

So sure, there are arguments for using it, and one of those arguments is consideration for your users. And I appluad that. Bu that also cuts both ways - there are arguments against using it. And the only person who should make the decision is the author of a page, not some arbitrary "Hey, that's a picture, you have to hide that cos some people don't wanna see em" arbitrary "rule" of Netiquette.

You should be able to flag "You may not want to read this" content if you want, absolutely. And lj-cut is the best way of doing it given the basic client. But the only person who should decide when to use it is you - you should be able to say "This is how I want you to view my page." Not "This is how one of my readers who complained about long posts on their friends page wants you to see my post.", which is where all this started :)

sol.
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Re: Implementation vs concept.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Ah, I think we're mostly in agreement then. I certainly prefer for people to use LJ-cut for long posts, but I wouldn't dream of making it mandatory - I hadn't realised that was what you were talking about. I'm quite happy to express my preferences as to how people should present their pages, as long as it's on the understanding that they're completely free to ignore said preferences.

So sure, it does get used as a "here be dragons" content tag, or whatever, and that's not a bad idea when you enter the post, but when I come along to read it, it means I do have to make two requests to get all the data, when really I should only have to make one.

I tend to view most of my friends' posts several times, because I check every so often to see if anybody's commenting - and if there are no new comments, I scroll past to the next one.

If people LJ-cut, it means two extra mouse-clicks (one to read the cut first time through, one to get rid of the window or hit the Back button) but it also reduces the amount of scrollage on subsequent viewings. The more times I'm likely to go over those posts, and the longer they are, the more worthwhile LJ-cut becomes. I'd rather take those two extra clicks than scroll past a page of ranting maybe half a dozen times; I saw it the first time.

Some sort of automatic "only show me long stuff the first time through, unless I ask for it" feature would give me the best of both worlds, but I don't know how practical that would be to code.

Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but clicking on an LJ cut link, as far as I can see, expands *all* the lj-cuts in a post. That again seems suboptimal.

Yes it does, and yes it is IMHO. I don't see much point in using multiple cuts as they're currently handled.

Irony of Ironies!!

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

I meant also to say in that that it was good to see people defending the lj-cut tag with good, "I'm a designer and I use it deliberately for X,Y and Z because it's the best tool.". That's *good*, and that's the best use of a suboptimal tool [0].


But I couldn't, because LJ won't let me post more than 4300 characters in a comment .. in my own journal!!!
Now, if that's a hard limit, then it's suboptimal [0]. But if I can set it in my preferences somewhere, then it's a good example of a *good tool*. Because it's not the limit that's the problem, so long as I can say "Ok, in my journal, I want a 3000 character limit for everyone else, but no limits on my comments.".

But now I'm waffling. I just thouhgt it was ironic that I got bounced on my own journal for having a comment be too long :)

sol
[0] By suboptimal I don't mean bad. Almost every piece of software is suboptimal in some way. Especially in something like LJ which expanded very quickly and doesn't have unlimited resources. What I mean is that the application or use the street has found for lj-cut may have outgrown it's original design. Not that the tool is "bad", just that it doesn't quite meet the need it's being used for. Because indeed, sometimes authors will want to say "Ok, this is another bit, and I wanna make you work for it". And lj-cut is perfect for that. It's not so perfect for splitting an entry up into "webtest, image, boring text, pornogrpahic text ..." etc, and it's *certainly* not the tool for imposing *client* or reader preferences about how to view an entry.

sol.
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Re: Irony of Ironies!!

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

A semi-relevant story:

Some years back, when I first discovered Usenet, I used a number of variants on rn, trn etc.

One of these was set up so you COULD NOT post an article containing more lines of quoted than original text. If you tried, you got an error message to the effect of "This is poor netiquette, I won't let you do it."

So of course I did what I imagine everybody else did too, and simply padded out the post with whitespace, resulting in *less* signal-to-noise rather than more.

Moral of the story is that counting on computers to enforce good manners is pretty much hopeless, because 'good manners' is far too complex and subtle a concept to be evaluated by a simple set of machine-usable rules. Sometimes they're OK for preventing exceptionally bad behaviour - spamming and other DoS-equivalents. But on subtler things like posting length, it's a foolhardy exercise and likely to create as many problems as it solves. (I'm assuming that a 4800 character response in a single post places less demands on LJ's servers than the same response split into two posts...)

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Because I know the majority of my friends feel differently.
Because if I don't, I have to listen to people whine about it.
Because I know who my audience are, and how they feel, and it's important to me.
But that's still my choice. There's an overwhelming argument, in this case, that if I want y'all to keep me on your friends page, I should cut. And I've never argued that, I've just argued that if I *don't* want you guys to keep me as a friend, I'll post my way, and there's no moral high ground involved, there's just a *practical* edcision about audience.

My point here is simply that there is no one "rudeness", and that this whole "Consider others" crap is predicated on a universal concept of good manners that simply doesn't hold. *If* I happen to know what your audience will prefer, *and* it's important to me that they remain my audience, then I should behave accordingly. In *our* little group, a is reasonably true, and b is also fairly true. And I have no realy strong feelings about my style - I don't *care* how I post. But I can totally see that other people may feel differently - that the kind of posts drood and jwz make really *are* well served by the way they're made, and would lose a lot, IMHO, if they were to be lj-cutted to hell. So it becomes a practical decision based on your understanding of your audience and your desire to keep them. What I object to is dragging that out onto some moral high ground about "cluttering the Internet's public spaces" and "pissing on my carpet". Fuck that. THere is no moral high ground, there is no one true politeness.

sol.
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[kitling.livejournal.com]

"When *I* read my friends page (actually, my friendsfriends, but same diff), I look forward to droods long rambling posts. I don't *want* to have to click on an LJ cut tag to get the rest of it. I want it all there, in it's natural glory, so I can just read and read and read. Jamie Zawinskies constant posting of pictures is the same deal - I *want* them right there. On my friends page, in my face, so I don't have to hunting through links to get them. Because they're funny, they're clever, they're thought-provoking, they're worthwhile. To *me*. So to my mind, it's "rude" to make me go clicking on links to see stuff I'll almost certainly want to see. I've already gone to all the damn effort of adding you to my friends page. I *want* to hear what you have to say. So say it, don't go messing me around with lj-cut tags."

So why do *you* use lj-cut on your long posts?