On 15.09.14 09:29, Will Yardley wrote: > Yes, but if you forget to do this, or manually mangle a line, you could > end up generating non-compliant text. > > My point isn't that there aren't editors that are capable of generating > the text correctly, but that it's difficult to mutt to know for sure > that you have done so.
On 15.09.14 14:48, Derek Martin wrote: > You had to understand how it works, and configure your editor to do it > right. Most users do not want to do that, and they should not have to. IIUC, the message is that those users not only do not care to take care with what they present to the reader, they just don't care. That has its price. Now I understand why Google was in such a hurry to develop and certify self-driving cars. Humanity's sense of entitlement to be too stupid to move from point A to point B without a supervising agency to exercise a "Duty of Care" is reaching critical mass. It amuses me when apparently capable adults blame the tool in their hands for their own occasional incompetence. "Just 'fess up when you forgot to run the spell checker, to compensate for the fact that you can't spell worth a damn." is my philosophy. TBT, I have for some time now taken carelessly reflowed quoted text as a signal that a post is not worth reading, and so delete it on sight. To date I have not noticed any impact on my enjoyment of the thread in which they appear, and it saves time which can be spent on posts from the thoughtful majority who realise that their post must buy readership. Mind you, failure to capitalise sentence starts is another reliable "Delete instead of reading" trigger, I find. Not so much because the carelessness makes reading harder, as because those posts almost invariably lack substantial content. When seeking a technological fix for every human skill deficiency, I'm reminded of: Naeser's Law: You can make it foolproof, but you can't make it damnfoolproof. Erik -- "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
