3 ms·
The markup/formatting of their paragraphs-and-newline example is messed up. Also: > %%[Is this clearer? @stephen]%% > You can sign the comment with a @handle
by cxr 3y ago
The markup/formatting of their paragraphs-and-newline example is messed up. Also:
> %%[Is this clearer? @stephen]%%
> You can sign the comment with a @handle as the last word.
Author seems to fundamentally misunderstand the significance of having "@" precede the names of folks in the conventions of online discourse. "@" means "at". You're addressing someone. In this example, they're signing off, instead—the exact opposite. Their prescribed format means that if you encounter a message like the one in the above example somewhere in the wild, then you have to be very careful to stop and consider the context to disambiguate between whether it was written by someone (who is not Stephen) expecting Stephen respond to the question, or whether it was written by Stephen himself expecting someone else to answer. This is bad design.
(The choice of "%" to denote comments is also pretty odd—particularly for a format that's supposed to be more human-centered than other more traditional formats. It strikes me as something that was arbitrary more than anything else.)
- dash2 3y agoWhat's your email address?
- cxr 3y agolettersregardingdavidnotknowingwhatprecedemeans@cold.moon
- dash2 3y agoStop talking to your email server! More seriously, it's called an "address" because people can "address" you with it. There's a natural overlap between at-ing somebody, and putting your name up so that people can at you. The @ sign helps clarify that is what this is, and it also differentiates it from the text. Have you got a simpler and more intuitive alternative?
- cxr 3y agoIf someone writes "Is this clearer? @stephen" today, that looks like a person who is not Stephen trying to direct their question to Stephen. It's not the most conventional way to do it, because the most common practice would be to address Stephen at the beginning of the message, but it's still unambiguously a message for Stephen, not from Stephen. That's literally what it means: This is directed at Stephen. The linked proposal reverses this by turning "@foo" into a signoff/attribution instead of an address, increasing the amount of ambiguity in communication—"Wait, what conventions are we following? The natural way of reading things, or are we in the world of Suggestions files where up is down?" > Have you got a simpler and more intuitive alternative? Yeah, the way people have been doing it forever: --stephen You don't need to invent new syntax for it, let alone counterintuitive syntax.
- dash2 3y agoBut the -- clashes with the delete symbol…
- cxr 3y agoWhose fault is that?
- dash2 3y agoMy fault, sure, but you didn’t suggest a better delete symbol. One would be ~~[ ]~~ but I think it’s less intuitive for the average person. I see the strength of your argument, but I suspect it works better for the extremely online.
- cxr 3y ago> you didn’t suggest a better delete symbol Someone else already pointed out the existing "plain word diff" syntax[1] that (a) is actually more human-friendly and (b) neither you nor the other respondent actually addressed—you both just pirouetted around it while hoping that no one would notice, I guess (by changing the subject to how bad Git and GitHub are—true, but completely irrelevant to the merit of using --[foo]-- over [-foo-]). > One would be ~~[ ]~~ That would be genuinely terrible—for basically the same reasons that --[foo]-- is worse than [-foo-], but more extreme. > it works better for the extremely online I thought this was supposed to be designed for actual human beings? 1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791539>