All analogies suck.
Jan. 9th, 2003 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tyggerjaiSO 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.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
.
*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.
.