Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Mon, 30 Apr 2001 02:53:36 -0400 | From | "Eric S. Raymond" <> | Subject | Re: CML2 1.3.1, aka "I stick my neck out a mile..." |
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David Emory Watson <demoryw@pacbell.net>: > Oh. Well in hindsight, I guess your are right. After all I wouldn't > want to be a luser, much less associated with AOL. Gosh I never > realized. Maybe I just didn't read the right standards manual when I > started using the internet. Where did you learn all of this? No, > nevermind I don't care. I'm sorry for contributing to this silly flame > war.
Time for me to put on my hacker-folklorist hat...
Actually, Al is sort of half-right here. There used to be a 4-lines-or-less convention on USENET, back in the days when bandwidth was expensive. I adhered to it then, because it mattered.
Nowadays it doesn't -- at least not at that level. Huge sigs with embedded ASCII graphics and the like are still best avoided, but merely because they're tasteless and distracting.
I don't think I've heard anyone invoke the 4-line rule since about 1992, though. I didn't start generating short random quotes into my sig until about 1996, well after the "standard" was effectively dead.
Despite the demise of the 4-line standard, I have a pretty definite impression that the average size of sigs actually dropped in the 1990s. The main thing that formerly inflated a lot of them was the need to list multiple bang-path addresses and other forms of contact info. Reliable @-addressing pretty much eliminated that pressure.
Even back in its day this "rule" was frequently abused as a socially acceptable way to attack people whose opinions or style one disliked. This is doubtless one reason it failed to survive the bandwidth boom.
Hmmm. Maybe this should be a Jargon File entry... -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder. -- Frederick Bastiat - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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