I enjoyed writing this ALOT!

[John Chambers]

Grant Mongardi wrote:
| I thought you folks might enjoy this rant. This guy's a good friend, but
| I constantly give him a hard time about his M$-centric lifestyle, and he
| will do the same to me for my *NIX-centric leanings. He's a very bright
| Windows admin, and we give each other jabs on a regular basis. But this
| particular one was alot of fun.
...
| Sheep. That's what you are. When was the last time you used software
| that wasn't tied to some sort of proprietary format? Would you buy a car
| that could only run on gasoline that the manufacturer provided? And in
| two years when they say support for your car's gasoline is EOL, would
| you be dumb enough to buy another one?
|
| You could read it, couldn't you? It didn't hurt your eyes, did it? It
| wasn't friggen blinking, scrolling, or otherwise containing some sort of
| annoying 'feature' that the manufacturer thought was a proper way to
| display text. It's TEXT. I'm sending you TEXT! No images, no colors, no
| embedded music. It's JUST TEXT. HTML is for web pages and sales guys. If
| I want to convey a message, I can do it with just words.
|
| Did I convey my ideas effectively in this message?


Yeah, and I've heard/read  some  very  similar  comments  from  a  number  of
professional journalists.  Their attitude tends to be "I write news articles,
which consist of words arranged into sentences.  It's the job of the  editors
and  layout guys to make it look pretty on the page or screen or whatever.  I
don't need to be distracted by the fancy features like fonts or  colors  that
word processors try to foist on me, and I've been bitten too many times by my
text coming out garbled because the recipient has different  release  of  the
software than mine.  I don't do pictures; that's the photographers' job. So I
use a plain-text editor. It doesn't matter which one; what matters is that it
delivers  the  words,  punctuation,  etc.,  just as I typed them, and nothing
else.  The recipients can and will feed my text to formatters,  since  that's
their job.  My job is to supply the words explaining the news story."

OTOH, I've read a few comments about the New York Times  teaching  some  very
basic  HTML  to  their  journalists.  They say this has worked out well.  The
journalists are very conservative with their markup, and  when  they  us  it,
they  almost  always  get it right.  The editors save some time, and they can
often send the text right to the layout folks.   They're  apparently  happier
with  this than with the grief of trying to word-processor docs degarbled and
converted correctly to all their output formats.  And they say they get a lot
of  comments  that  their  stories  are more readable (on whatever screen the
readers are using) than the stories  from  most  other  news  sources.   They
consider  this  the  result  of  avoiding word processing software, and using
mostly hand-typed HTML.

But they've gotta be under pressure to make their stuff a lot flashier.   The
marketers  usually  love flash (in both uses of the term).  Younger hires are
probably used to word processors, and will resist learning a "primitive" text
editor.  We'll see.  I just checked nytimes.com, and the front page does have
two slightly annoying changing pieces.  There's an obvious flash  ad  on  the
right,  plus  "Readers'  opinions" quote in the middle that changes every few
seconds (and can't be selected with the mouse).  Aside from that, there's  no
distracting moving images to interfere with reading the text.  It may be that
they've managed to learn  something  from  the  move  to  the  new  world  of
electronic news distribution.



--
There are three kinds of people in this world,
those who count and those who don't.