On Tue, 2011-08-09 at 13:53 -0700, Paul Allen Newell wrote:
> Yours is a good rule, though I accept the shift key as a fact of life
> (this letter is evidence of that; otherwise, capitalization would be
> lost). I prefer underbar to hyphen for space as hyphen is a legit
> character, but I can see that such is just a matter of personal
> choice.
The shift key is a necessary evil, but it's beyond the comprehension of
some people. They don't understand how to type various symbols, or can
even recognise what some of them are. And just look at the emails
you'll see that are written in all lower case, or with the caps lock
stuck on. Leading to another problem - some people can't comprehend the
difference between caps lock and shift.
So my rule was to make it easy, very easy, for everyone else. Make it
easy to say over the phone or radio, without needing complex
instructions. That also goes down to choosing the words that you use
carefully, too (spelling, familiar words, not jamming words together
which double-up letters in confusing places, as far as typing is
concerned - consider sports-stars versus sportsstars).
I used to use the underscore, as it made sense (to me, and other
programmers) as a substitute for a space. But there's two drawbacks:
1. Try explaining to the clueless what an underscore is, and how to
type it. Try doing that again and again, and you get real sick of it.
2. You have the messy combinations of punctuation such as:
Shakespeare_-_The_Taming_of_the_Shrew
Where it'd really be better to collapse all punctuation down to just one
punctuation symbol. That's "better" as in "easier and more convenient,"
not more lexically correct. Remember these are URIs (i.e. codes), not
general language.
3. If you ever want a URI printed on a newspaper or magazine, whoever
types it may not be able to get an underscore into the text, unless
they're familiar with how their publishing system works. And, even
then, they may fail. Many of them will convert an underscore into an EM
dash, since an underscore is hardly ever desired in print, yet proper
dashes are wanted all the time.
When it comes to the web, people (mostly) find you through search
engines, where they don't have to type URIs, but do have to be able to
think of the keywords that will find you. Or, you have to think of the
keywords that people might use while trying to find your product or
information. Then there's personal referrals, and you want such
addresses to be typed error-free. And verbal referrals, be that
person-to-person, or broadcast, where such URIs need be as close to
phonetic as you can manage, so it's said error-free, and listeners can
type it error-free by what they presume they heard.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686
Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I
read messages from the public lists.
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