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Friday, April 21, 2006
But, then again.
He might be crazy. John Dean, the lawyer turned gov't witness of Nixon's Watergate days, makes a pretty credible analysis that he is crazy.
TINYURL, lousy idea! To explain, I'll just paste what I earlier tonight sent to Henk Ruyssenaars, for he's another of the very few people still using this damn highschool project of non-serious order utility, tinyurl.
Quote: "P.S. TINYURL.com:
It is a bad idea, ya know. Very few people use this scheme and while I had begun to become wary of using it, an article helped to solidify my concern.
Very simply, people haven't a clue what the actual url is for the webpage that's going to be loaded, and the best thing to do for readers is to provide URLs that match to the site that will be loaded from, whether it be the homepage only, for some sites require this, or else pages within the site and therefore full URLs. But the minimum is a url that maps to whatever page is actually going to be loaded.
Tinyurl is a handier device for spying, or causing problems for users, than it is in terms of user-friendliness. It may be convenient for writers of articles, or for only personal use, but is rather really lousy for readers who haven't a clue what the real mapping is.
People writing articles and wishing to provide only short links, not with a long piece text or url appearing to readers, can simply use the old and very simple html trick. F.e.:
That, as I assume you know, will show readers only the hyperlinked 'NobelPrize.org', instead of the whole or actual URL, but which readers can easily verify by simply holding the mouse pointer over the hyperlinked text.
That is the very best way in terms of clean Internet etiquette, while the next best is to simply make the whole, actual url entirely visible to the user or reader, right up front. Neither of these are guaranteed, but: a) users can easily verify what is visible by holding the mouse pointer over the hyperlinked text; and b), it can help to make it clearer to users or readers what the author had in mind, while simply having made a mistake. Using tinyurl, it's less evident what the author had in mind, when there's a non-match like in the case of the tinyurl link this email's for to begin with, f.e.
As convenient as it is to a few, very few, authors or writers, tinyurl should be obsoleted. It's really and entirely pointless to begin with, just some passtime highschool mini-project that has basically no professional value.
When it first came out, plenty of people "jumped on the bandwagon", but very rare do we find it being used today."
It's better to provide audiences over the www, as well as when webpages are printed out, with literal URLs, but when they're long, then truncating using the above html "trick" is suitable and people reading the text over the Internet can view what the real url is. NOT with tiny url, though.
How did I get my post, just above, to treat the "<a href=...>...<a>" as literal text, instead of hyperlinking it? Are you wondering about that, do you care about it?
If yes, then it's simply by, well, first let's say that ':' is the ampersand character for the sake of explaining this, because I don't know how the escape character is treated in this kind of posting (the special character for instructing the system or server or application to interpret the immediately following character literally, instead of interpretively). After that it's just a matter of writing ":lt;a =http:...:gt;:lt;a:gt;".
(":lt;" and ":gt;" in html gets treated in terms of what html viewers see as "<" and ">", respectively.)
That doesn't sound great for writers, I know, but it's better for end users or readers and, therefore, for overall communication. After all, professional authorship does have some etiquette requirement to keep audiences in mind. Why? Because authorship is about communication, and sound communication requires keeping the audience in mind. It's up to communicators to get what they want to deliver across, for it's the communicator who's delivering and who wishes to deliver. If the communicator fails, after having been as simply clear as possible, then it's not his or her failure. However, if she or he fails because he or she was unable to speak to the audience, while the audience can understand other communicators of comparable level or achievement, then the failure in communicating is the communicator's fault, not the audience's.
At least two parties are always involved in communications, else there simply and really isn't any communication going on. And both parties can be right and wrong with respect to whether the communication is successful in terms of being understood, or not. Once understood, then the audience can reject, and that's not the communicator's fault, unless he or she is simply wrong or mistaken. If he or she is right and the audience rejects it, after clearly having understood it, then it's the audience's fault.
2 comments:
TINYURL, lousy idea! To explain, I'll just paste what I earlier tonight sent to Henk Ruyssenaars, for he's another of the very few people still using this damn highschool project of non-serious order utility, tinyurl.
Quote: "P.S. TINYURL.com:
It is a bad idea, ya know. Very few people use this scheme and while I had begun to become wary of using it, an article helped to solidify my concern.
Very simply, people haven't a clue what the actual url is for the webpage that's going to be loaded, and the best thing to do for readers is to provide URLs that match to the site that will be loaded from, whether it be the homepage only, for some sites require this, or else pages within the site and therefore full URLs. But the minimum is a url that maps to whatever page is actually going to be loaded.
Tinyurl is a handier device for spying, or causing problems for users, than it is in terms of user-friendliness. It may be convenient for writers of articles, or for only personal use, but is rather really lousy for readers who haven't a clue what the real mapping is.
People writing articles and wishing to provide only short links, not with a long piece text or url appearing to readers, can simply use the old and very simple html trick. F.e.:
<a href="http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates">NobelPrize.org</a>
That, as I assume you know, will show readers only the hyperlinked 'NobelPrize.org', instead of the whole or actual URL, but which readers can easily verify by simply holding the mouse pointer over the hyperlinked text.
That is the very best way in terms of clean Internet etiquette, while the next best is to simply make the whole, actual url entirely visible to the user or reader, right up front. Neither of these are guaranteed, but: a) users can easily verify what is visible by holding the mouse pointer over the hyperlinked text; and b), it can help to make it clearer to users or readers what the author had in mind, while simply having made a mistake. Using tinyurl, it's less evident what the author had in mind, when there's a non-match like in the case of the tinyurl link this email's for to begin with, f.e.
As convenient as it is to a few, very few, authors or writers, tinyurl should be obsoleted. It's really and entirely pointless to begin with, just some passtime highschool mini-project that has basically no professional value.
When it first came out, plenty of people "jumped on the bandwagon", but very rare do we find it being used today."
It's better to provide audiences over the www, as well as when webpages are printed out, with literal URLs, but when they're long, then truncating using the above html "trick" is suitable and people reading the text over the Internet can view what the real url is. NOT with tiny url, though.
Mike Corbeil
How did I get my post, just above, to treat the "<a href=...>...<a>" as literal text, instead of hyperlinking it? Are you wondering about that, do you care about it?
If yes, then it's simply by, well, first let's say that ':' is the ampersand character for the sake of explaining this, because I don't know how the escape character is treated in this kind of posting (the special character for instructing the system or server or application to interpret the immediately following character literally, instead of interpretively). After that it's just a matter of writing ":lt;a =http:...:gt;:lt;a:gt;".
(":lt;" and ":gt;" in html gets treated in terms of what html viewers see as "<" and ">", respectively.)
That doesn't sound great for writers, I know, but it's better for end users or readers and, therefore, for overall communication. After all, professional authorship does have some etiquette requirement to keep audiences in mind. Why? Because authorship is about communication, and sound communication requires keeping the audience in mind. It's up to communicators to get what they want to deliver across, for it's the communicator who's delivering and who wishes to deliver. If the communicator fails, after having been as simply clear as possible, then it's not his or her failure. However, if she or he fails because he or she was unable to speak to the audience, while the audience can understand other communicators of comparable level or achievement, then the failure in communicating is the communicator's fault, not the audience's.
At least two parties are always involved in communications, else there simply and really isn't any communication going on. And both parties can be right and wrong with respect to whether the communication is successful in terms of being understood, or not. Once understood, then the audience can reject, and that's not the communicator's fault, unless he or she is simply wrong or mistaken. If he or she is right and the audience rejects it, after clearly having understood it, then it's the audience's fault.
I like clarity in communications, ya see.
Mike Corbeil
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