[fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Tomas Hajny wrote:
> On Fri, March 8, 2013 17:04, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>> Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
>>
>>> Also, there as no specific person I targeted in
>>> fpc-devel. Almost all posts lately contain about 95% quoted text! How
>>> does a moderator fail to see this?
>> I really don't want to prolong this and perhaps upset more people than
>> necessary, but has it occurred to you that that's how mailing lists work
>> and that possibly your expectations are unreasonable?
>  .
>  .
> 
> Just to add another view (to show that it is not a fight among two clearly
> delineated camps):
..

Points noted and generally agreed.

> - I do not share the opinion of Mark that sending URLs should be
> considered inappropriate or that senders willing to share some link with
> others ought to spend time on creating different (shorter) URLs in cases
> like this (and from this point of view I don't see anything wrong on
> Graeme's original post).

I didn't say it was inappropriate, I said that providing a TinyURL 
alternative would have helped people who- for some reason or other- 
couldn't cut-and-paste the full one. This is particularly the case for 
YouTube, which typically demands a fairly recent browser/Flash 
combination which might not be present on somebody's primary work 
computer. In the current case, Google doesn't throw up a link to that 
video on trivial searches (and more credit to Graham for finding and 
sharing it as a result) but there's no way that I- for one- am going to 
start trying to transcribe the entire URL to the laptop next to my main 
system during work hours: I've got much more important things to do.

Of course, simply putting up a TinyURL without explanation is at least 
as bad as posting a long URL which risks attracting enforced line 
breaks: I don't know about anybody else, but I'm blowed if I'm going to 
click on every URL I'm given whatever my level of safeguards :-) The 
ideal- and this is a convention that I'm used to from a private 
conferencing system I use- is to post the original URL, the TinyURL 
equivalent, and a very brief description... I was going to give an 
example from XKCD but I see that that already uses concise URLs, 
possibly because the artist has a clue.

So again, to avoid any possible doubt: I am not complaining about URLs 
in the general case. I /am/ complaining, politely as a non-moderator, 
about the assumption that a URL embedded in a mailing list message is 
appropriate or intelligible, although it's clearly not as bad as an 
animated GIF in somebody's sig.

And finally- and this one's for you Graeme- I wouldn't be complaining 
about the URL being less than useful if I hadn't made a minimal attempt 
to view it, on the basis that you're not a total idiot and might be 
making an interesting or at least amusing point.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]