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Bob Cunningham
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:11 am
Post subject: Re: Clickable links [was: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web |
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On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 11:56:29 -0700, "Skitt"
<skitt99@comcast.net> said:
| Quote: | Bob Cunningham wrote:
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[...]
| Quote: | I advocated enclosing URLs in angle brackets, and I thought
that was a tidy, foolproof approach, but there was at least
one poster who didn't like it.
I tried that, but the angle brackets get removed as soon as
whatever comes next to the closing one gets typed.
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I wonder if anyone has reported that problem to Microsoft.
Why should an editor be allowed to remove something we have
typed? |
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Tony Cooper
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 3:37 am
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning [was: Re: _Chicago Manual |
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On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 16:34:16 GMT, Bob Cunningham
<exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote:
| Quote: | I like to think that I follow British punctuation
conventions. They can hardly be properly called
idiosyncratic while they are used by millions of
Englishpersons.
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OK for you to say, but ...
--
Tony Cooper
Orlando, FL |
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Maria Conlon
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 4:58 am
Post subject: Re: Clickable links [was: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web |
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Bob Cunningham wrote, in part:
| Quote: | Donna participated in the discussions, and you can see by
looking at her postings what her conclusion seems to have
been. It evidently was to always put a URL on a line by
itself. She nearly always does that.
There's a trap there, though, that she may not have thought
of: When a posting is quoted, all of its lines get an
attribution tag in column one, including lines that may have
had URLs by themselves. This results in a URL that has ">"
precatenated to it. If the URL that was on a line by itself
wasn't preceded by a space, this means that the URL has the
">" directly precatenated. I tried that with Agent, and
Agent didn't object, but other newsreaders might.
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In OE, the attribution tag (usually ">") automatically has a space
following, whether one is posting or reading.
Maria Conlon |
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Steve Hayes
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 5:46 am
Post subject: Re: Clickable links [was: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web |
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On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 05:38:20 GMT, Bob Cunningham <exw6sxq@earthlink.net>
wrote:
| Quote: | On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 18:11:14 -0700, "Skitt"
skitt99@comcast.net> said:
Bob Cunningham wrote:
"Skitt" said:
[...]
Why make that user copy and paste
in order to spare yourself the inconvenience of typing a
couple of spaces?
Well, when I posted that URL I didn't know that Agent still had that
problem.
It's not a question of whether or not Agent has the problem.
There are many other newsreaders in use. (See
http://www.exw6sxq.com/sparky/aue_related/newsreaders_xxxx.html
, where "xxxx" stands for any year 1996 through 2004.) It's
a matter of not being able to depend upon any one of the
many newsreaders providing the capability to click on a link
that isn't suitably delimited.
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I read newsgroups offline, and therefore I almost never click on links I find
in newsgroups, so I've never noticed the problems you seem to be talking about
here.
But if I put a web URL into a newsgroup message, I always put it on a line of
its own, separated by blank lines above and below. I also usually only give
Web URLs as supplements to the information in a newsgroup message, rather than
as a substitute for it.
It seems to me that if others did the same, it would solve your problem too.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk |
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Ross Howard
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 1:09 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning [was: Re: _Chicago Manual |
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On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 16:34:16 GMT, Bob Cunningham
<exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrought:
| Quote: | On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 11:18:27 +0200, Ross Howard
gguiri@yahoo.com> said:
Considering that Bob's such a careful and thoughtful (if occasionally,
as here, a tad idiosyncratic) punctuator himself,
I like to think that I follow British punctuation
conventions. They can hardly be properly called
idiosyncratic while they are used by millions of
Englishpersons.
I use the alternation of double and single quotation marks
in the American style, but we have been told that some
British publishers do that, too.
I omit the periods in the initials of proper names -- as in
"P G Wodehouse" -- but we have been told by at least one
British posters that there is a tendency for that to become
the practice over there.
What features of my punctuation practices do you judge to be
idiosyncratic?
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Your adoption of BrE punc practices isn't what I meant. I was
referring only to the comma under discussion: Donna's "That's what
makes foreign, foreign."
After two posters called it "alien", "wrong" and "misleading", you
said you found it "perfectly acceptable". Isn't that idiosyncratic?
I think I understand your reasons for finding a comma there
acceptable -- I can appreciate where you're coming from -- but, even
so, it's not really any more acceptable than "I painted the town, red"
or "I like my steak, blue" or "I find comma usage, quite hard".
Syntactically, it's just as obtrusive.
--
Ross Howard |
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Jim Lawton
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 1:26 pm
Post subject: Re: About that "too" |
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On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 23:12:15 GMT, Bob Cunningham <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote:
| Quote: | On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 18:13:14 GMT, Jim Lawton
usenet1@jimlawton.TAKEOUTinfo> said:
[...]
What sort of clock would select 6 minutes over five for
punching purposes?
One whose punching mechanism had been designed to disregard
minutes and advance its punching time in increments of 0.1
hour.
I can imagine that it would be more complicated for the
mechanism to count minutes and advance the punching time
every so many minutes, than to have a wheel geared to rotate
ten times per hour and trigger the punching time on each
revolution.
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I think not. The whole idea of a mechanical clock, since minute-counting began,
has been gearing "geared" to divisions by sixty. The "tenths wheel" would be an
added complication, not a simplification. All the clocks I ever saw punched the
time , in hours and minutes. Next time I go to the industrial museum, I'll keep
my eyes open, and see what I can see.
| Quote: | To get the complete punching time, the clock
would only have to combine the value of the hour and the
value of the tenths counter.
The clock could, of course, be designed to punch to the
nearest minute, but I can see where that would impose an
extra burden on payroll clerks who didn't want to be
bothered with that degree of precision.
Also, if a payroll clerk were given a time worked in hours
and minutes, in order to compute the amount due, the clerk
would have to convert the minutes to some decimal fraction
of an hour in order to multiply it by the hourly rate.
(Nowadays a computer would do all of that, but I'm thinking
about the 1950s, before we "went IBM".) It's obviously more
efficient to hand the clerk the converted value to begin
with.
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I'm afraid that the task was made very simple for time clerks in those days. No
matter how early you were you got no extra money. If you were even one minute
late you were "docked a quarter" - you lost the whole quarter of an hour. The
idea wasn't that your time was calculated on your attendance, the idea was, that
the clock showed that you had worked your whole shift. Not to be there was an
offence.
| Quote: |
I was hauled over the coals in 1964 for "persistent
lateness" - I'd accumulated 15 minutes of "lates" in 3
months.
My boss once showed me a memo from his boss that said
something like
Now that <name withheld> is no longer with us,
I guess Bob Cunningham will be the one who
most often punches in a tenth or so late.
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Those were the days.
--
Jim
the polymoth |
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Charles Riggs
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:33 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning [was: Re: _Chicago Manual |
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On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 21:37:20 GMT, Tony Cooper
<tony_cooper213@earthlink.net> wrote:
| Quote: | On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 16:34:16 GMT, Bob Cunningham
exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote:
I like to think that I follow British punctuation
conventions. They can hardly be properly called
idiosyncratic while they are used by millions of
Englishpersons.
OK for you to say, but ...
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Yeah, yeah, but it's a different story when using what could be called
British punctuation than when an American self-conciously uses British
spellings. For example, the Oxford comma, even though it is sometimes
called the Harvard comma, is generally thought British, innit? If an
American chose to use it because it made better sense to him than the
usual American practice, that's a far cry from saying or writing
"lift" when "elevator" is unarguably just as suitable.
A similar argument could be made for an American preferring to write
"JS Bach", as opposed to the more American "J. S. Bach", although
laziness more than good sense may enter into that case.
--
Charles Riggs |
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Charles Riggs
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:33 pm
Post subject: Re: Clickable links [was: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web |
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On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 11:56:29 -0700, "Skitt" <skitt99@comcast.net>
wrote:
| Quote: | But don't worry -- I'll figure out something to make things easier for all,
possibly at the cost of poor punctuation.
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Are my eyes fooling me? Did Skitt write this?
--
Charles Riggs |
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Charles Riggs
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:33 pm
Post subject: Re: Clickable links [was: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web |
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On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 11:12:40 -0700, "Skitt" <skitt99@comcast.net>
wrote:
| Quote: | Charles Riggs wrote:
"Skitt" wrote:
Bob Cunningham wrote:
Anyway, I don't think Forte is offering Free Agent anymore,
but they still offer a free trial of Agent, if I remember
right.
Does it do e-mail? I don't want to use separate programs for e-mail
and newsgroups.
I must strenuously object to this practice. I say, use a program
designed for newsgroups for newsgroups and one specifically designed
for email for email. One doesn't eat peas using a spoon for the same
reason. I use Eudora, a quirky but excellent program once you
understand the quirks, on one computer and Outlook on another.
I don't understand your reluctance to use the same program for both. I
don't do much e-mail, so I din't want a separate program for it. I tried
Eudora (and Pegasus) many years ago, bet decided to stay with OE.
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I don't know much about OE, but I believe it handles email quite
nicely. Agent, though, which I prefer to OE for newsgroups, has none
of the cute features Eudora and Outlook, and perhaps OE, have: for
example, no filters and not even a way to put email from different
senders into separate folders, a feature I find very useful. Excellent
as Agent is for newsgroups, its email ability appears, to me, to be
merely an afterthought by its programmers.
| Quote: | I'd use Outlook -- a near-perfect product -- on both, but Microsoft
won't let me because I'd installed Outlook on a second computer, now
disused, already. I could talk with the good folks at Microsoft,
Dublin, to straighten this out, but haven't gotten a round toit.
I too would use Outlook, as I have it on my computer, but it doesn't do
newsgroups without switching to OE.
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Right, which is why I used both Outlook and Agent. I'm not so sure
Eudora, which I'm now forced to use on my desktop, isn't better than
Outlook, for one reason. I've heard it can be done, but I've found no
way to store Outlook email in a folder I can back-up to another
device. This is easily done with Eudora files.
--
Charles Riggs |
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Donna Richoux
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 5:15 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning [was: Re: _Chicago Manual |
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Ross Howard <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote:
| Quote: | Your adoption of BrE punc practices isn't what I meant. I was
referring only to the comma under discussion: Donna's "That's what
makes foreign, foreign."
After two posters called it "alien", "wrong" and "misleading", you
said you found it "perfectly acceptable". Isn't that idiosyncratic?
I think I understand your reasons for finding a comma there
acceptable -- I can appreciate where you're coming from -- but, even
so, it's not really any more acceptable than "I painted the town, red"
or "I like my steak, blue" or "I find comma usage, quite hard".
Syntactically, it's just as obtrusive.
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Ross, it doesn't matter deeply to me if experts have written eight or
ten or twenty-seven rules about grammatical places where commas must be
used. They have never, to my knowledge, written a rule saying "And those
are the ONLY eight (or ten or twenty-seven) places!" Even though the
General Comma Drought we are now experiencing would make you think that
anyone who uses one dot more than Absolutely Required is causing a
hardship to his or her neighbor.
Bob, the old (16-18th century) method is called the "Elocutionary
School" or system of punctuation (as contrasted to the Syntactical).
Comma, pause one beat.
Colon, pause two beats.
Semicolon, pause three beats.
Period, pause four beats.
Never fear, Ross; I am not advocating a return to such a system. It's
useful to know about, though, when reading old literature. And if you're
gonna argue about what is "intrinsic" to the comma, surely you hafta
look at history...
--
Best -- Donna Richoux |
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Frances Kemmish
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 6:08 pm
Post subject: Re: About that "too" |
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Jim Lawton wrote:
| Quote: |
I'm afraid that the task was made very simple for time clerks in those days. No
matter how early you were you got no extra money. If you were even one minute
late you were "docked a quarter" - you lost the whole quarter of an hour. The
idea wasn't that your time was calculated on your attendance, the idea was, that
the clock showed that you had worked your whole shift. Not to be there was an
offence.
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When I worked at Cadbury's in 1968, we were docked 6 minutes pay if we
were 1 minute late. I don't know how long this had been the practice
there - they did tell us that the free cocoa and bread and butter had
been given since the factory opened in the 19th century, but they didn't
mention the history of the time clock.
Fran |
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Bob Cunningham
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 7:32 pm
Post subject: Re: Clickable links [was: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web |
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On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:33:32 +0100, Charles Riggs
<chriggs@éircom.net> said:
| Quote: | Agent, though, which I prefer to OE for newsgroups, has none
of the cute features Eudora and Outlook, and perhaps OE, have: for
example, no filters and not even a way to put email from different
senders into separate folders, a feature I find very useful. Excellent
as Agent is for newsgroups, its email ability appears, to me, to be
merely an afterthought by its programmers.
|
You may be confusing Agent with some other newsreader,
possibly Free Agent. Or, if you have tried Agent, you must
not have taken the time to explore the wealth of features it
has.
Agent has filters. Agent has folders, and you can have
e-mail from a given user, or based on several other
criteria, put into a separate folder automatically. I use
that feature fairly heavily.
In addition to routing things to folders automatically, I
can very easily file a posting or a group of postings in a
folder with a couple of mouse clicks.
Folders can also be used to categorize and store Usenet
postings, and I also use that heavily. I haven't counted
folders lately, but I would guess that I have about fifty of
them.
A huge advantage of Agent over some other newsreaders is
that I can choose -- with one mouse click -- to sort my list
of downloaded postings by subject, thread, author, date, or
size, and possibly by other criteria I'm not remembering at
the moment. Having sorted a list of postings in ascending
order on any criterion, I can with another mouse click
reverse the order of sorting on that same criterion.
When the list is to be sorted by thread, I can choose
whether to sort strictly on the "References" line or to
start a new thread anytime the subject line changes.
With a single mouse click, I can change the list to show
only messages that I haven't read, or messages that I have
read. (Messages that I have "read" include the ones from
users whose postings I've chosen to mark "read"
automatically before I look at them. That's my closest
approach to having a kill file.)
Those are only a few of the outstanding features that I like
in Agent. I could list several others, but I will be
content to say again that if anyone thinks he or she has any
idea of what Agent is like from having tried Free Agent, he
or she is greatly mistaken.
I sometimes wonder how much business Forte lost over the
years because people made up their minds about Agent based
on trying the greatly inferior Free Agent. |
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Arfur Million
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 7:46 pm
Post subject: Re: Clickable links [was: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web |
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Charles Riggs wrote:
<snip>
| Quote: |
Right, which is why I used both Outlook and Agent. I'm not so sure
Eudora, which I'm now forced to use on my desktop, isn't better than
Outlook, for one reason. I've heard it can be done, but I've found no
way to store Outlook email in a folder I can back-up to another
device.
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If you use Personal Folders, all of your emails can be stored in a
single file (something.pst) which can be copied anywhere you want it
to. I consider this to be a strength of Outlook, compared to other
email clients.
Regards,
Arfur |
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Matti Lamprhey
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 7:50 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
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"Bob Cunningham" <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote...
| Quote: | "Mike Lyle" <mike_lyle_uk@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk> said:
Gerald Smyth wrote:
Donna Richoux wrote:
[snip]
I'm well aware that phrases that are foreign to one's vocabulary
sound odd, bringing up the wrong associations. That's what makes
foreign, foreign.
That last comma there is positively alien to me....g
Just plain wrong to me. Misleading.
To me, it's perfectly acceptable. I take it to be
equivalent to "That's what makes foreign ... well, foreign",
but with not so great a pause.
There's nothing wrong with using a comma now and then with
its intrinsic meaning, to signal a pause.
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I'm definitely on the side of Bob and Donna here, with some surprise
that other respected Brits demur. Perhaps I'm overimbued with the
Elocutionary Principle.
Matti |
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R H Draney
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 8:07 pm
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
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Evan Kirshenbaum filted:
| Quote: |
R H Draney <dadoctah@spamcop.net> writes:
An argument could doubtless be made that someone should be able to
link to a page with a dot at the end of its address without making
people jump through hoops to get there...another argument could be
made that someone should be able to include URLs in text without
having the surrounding punctuation getting all caught up in them....
You mean that people should be able to talk about
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm> and
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm.> or even
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm with spaces> without
those getting confused?
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Was it your intention for all of those to be recognized as links?...I ask
because none of them were....r |
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