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From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-31:

"Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are." -- Harry G. Frankfurt, _On Bullshit_ (Princeton University Press).

(submitted to the mailing list by Stig Hackvan)

( Harry G. Frankfurt, on truth vs. lies vs. bullshit )

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Dear web page coder and/or automatic webification tool author,

If I have to make use of the ability in my browser to edit the page source in the 'view source' tab and have the changes reflected in the tab where I'd been trying to view your page, in order to read the damned thing, then you're doing it wrong.

If enlarging the font to make it easier to read causes horizontal scrolling because you hard-formatted the text into non-wrapping lines, unless I hand-edit the source first, then you're doing it wrong. And additional points off if the page starts off wider than my browser window when I initially load it, before any zooming.

There's at least one right way to convert man(1) pages into web pages. And, as I've observed this morning, at least one dead wrong way to do it.

no love,
Cranky Reader

PS: "<b>SEE</b> <b>ALSO</b>" instead of "<b>SEE ALSO</b>"? I am not impressed. Though that, at least, did not affect readability. What did you do, work from the nroff output with the embedded backspaces for bold, or something, instead of translating from the nroff source to HTML? Sheesh!

[In other news: not feeling at all well lately -- feels kinda like the flu minus a) the respiratory symptoms and b) the fever (as far as I can tell using a (very well cleaned) darkroom thermometer instead of a medical thermometer). Hot and cold flashes, dizziness, weakness, nausea; no fun, really no fun. Makes dragging myself out of the house to the grocery store difficult, though I'll try to go pick up a few things before the Ravens game if I can.]

( very short rantlet about naughty web coders or dastardly automatic-HTML-conversion tools (and a how-I'm-doing footnote) )

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