And a car is a horseless carriage
Posted on December 12, 2003
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 48 views |
Ross “Random Bytes” Rader, the big boss at Tucows, the company developing the very-cool-looking Blogware has decreed that common blogging terms be banned from Blogware’s lexicon because they confuse (aka “require them to learn” ) users too much:
RSS, XML, RDF, Trackbacks, Permalinks (and its complement, the wonderfully concise but completely equivocal “#”), Auto-discovery and even the word “Blog” itself are all completely meaningless to the average person.
As were ‘computer’, ‘monitor’, ‘micro-brew’ and ’sushi’ until these respective trends gained momentum, achieved the critical mass of ubiquity and become common-place.
The technical functions won’t disappear or change, but the UI will. “RSS” and “RDF” will cease to exist in Blogware-land - they will be replaced with the term “Syndication Format”. Trackbacks will likely become “Incoming References”. The term “Permalinks” and the hash sign are perma-banished from our vocabulary and will be perma-replaced by two perfectly understandable words “Permanent Link”. There will probably be more changes as I continue to run through the UI.
I agree with the hash sign replacement but that’s not the same as his other examples. The hash is a horrible interface element because it conveys no meaning whatsoever about it’s purpose. I’ve been reading blogs since day 1 and it stills requires a conscious “now where would the perma-link be? oh yeah…” each time I want to find it on someone’s post. The abolishment of that little ‘feature’ - a throw-back no doubt to some original implementer’s laziness - for something more coherant would serve us all well.
But taking perfectly legitimate terms, names, and replacing them with long descriptors doesn’t make much sense to me. Things have names for a reason and names get adopted. Trackback is an excellent example of this. It’s a perfectly legitimate term for a perfectly legitimate feature. IMO “Incoming References” is horrible - the first thing that springs to mind is “incoming??? How do I stop them?” Too close to spam imagery for my liking.
Otherwise I’d be sitting here typing this on my Automatical Multi-purpose Electronic Calculating Machine while waiting for the Verticaly-Oriented Overhead Hotwater Dispenser to free up so I can get into my Powered-By-Dead-Animals-What-Been-Crushed-Into-A-Usable-Subtstance-
By-Eons-Of-Extreme-Pressure-And-
Temperature Horseless Carriage to drive down the Really Long Stretchs of Pulverized, Tarred and Packed Smooth Rock Surface to get to my meeting on time.
There’s a difference between bad interface, bad implementation, bad description, and a new name. I think it does the users a greater disservice to stray from the common path into a padded-walls world of pseudo-comfort. Taking away common terminology from user’s who don’t know any better, regardless of how obscure that terminology may seem to them at the beginning, means stranding them later when they need to communicate with the rest of the world. It condems them to forever-more to a life of “trackbacks…oh, the software I use calls them ‘Incoming References’” conversations.
Just my two Fractions Of An Abstract Concept Used To Negotiate The Value of Goods Or Services.
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