Merging the Link Colors

By this I mean assigning the exact same color to both visited and unvisited links (a:link and a:visited in CSS), for an entire Web site. Jakob Nielsen has frequently railed against the practice; Eric S. Raymond has commented that people who do it "should be killed". I've been inclined to agree. But it's been vaguely ominous to see the rapidly increasing number of Web sites that indulge unashamedly in merged link colors -- not just artsy-fartsy personal pages, mind you, but sites that thousands of people use every day. Netflix, for example. Such sites make me wonder: is the visited/unvisited distinction on its way out? I'd have assumed this would be like removing the yellow from traffic lights, but apparently a lot of "designers" feel differently. Their philosophy seems to be that, above all, a site should look "clean" and "pure", while usability is a secondary consideration. In other words, it's more important to appear easy to use, than to actually be easy to use.

Well, then: Are they right? What do you think?

Excellent Introduction to Philosophy

Sally Haslanger's Problems of Philosophy (part of MIT OpenCourseWare) is a real gem, despite being presented as screwily-formatted PDF.

aaronsw: Point taken. I hadn't given a lot of thought to what your statement might mean; my complaint was with the wording of your comment, not necessarily with your opinion. It's true that TAOUP doesn't deal with "art" as much as the title might suggest.

mbp: Your post is exactly the sort of pointful critique that I intended to draw out. I do wonder why ESR appeared to be in such a hurry to finish the book. Of course, learning enough about other people's programs to use them as effective examples would take some time -- but I do hope that ESR, or someone else, will eventually take the time to do just that. You're right: it needs to be edited, and by other people.

Still, why do I like TAOUP? Again, I greatly appreciate the "case study" oriented format (even if it has some holes). Frankly, vague generalities bore me. I want the specifics, because it is in these that true wisdom shines through, "the open window through which you can see not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods. But if you say what it is that you see, you erect an image and an idol, and you misdirect people" (as Alan Watts puts it).

TAOUP isn't perfect. But I think ESR does a better job of exhibiting concrete examples than most people could, even if he does seem a bit enamored of his own projects at times. It's quite refreshing in a world of books discussing useless toy programs at length. What's important, I think, is that he went and did it: and now we can all read it and think about what needs to be improved, rather than just say "someone ought to write a book about the Unix philosophy".

One of my favorite sections, by the way, is Data File Metaformats. It's a piece that sorely needed writing, because so many people have trouble designing good textual formats.

SIGWTF

I stumbled across this entry in Aaron Swartz's weblog:

I've been working on a book called Small is Beautiful: The Unix Philosophy [...]

(Eric Raymond has a book called The Art of Unix Programming but he doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.)

And I'm, like: "Would you care to expound upon that?" This Swartz fellow doesn't seem to have a commenting facility on his site, so I'm saying it here. What, precisely, is so awful about TAOUP? Personally, I consider it to be one of the best books ever written on programming in general, let alone Unix programming. I found useful information and advice on every page.

Of course, I don't expect everyone to feel the same way about it. But the point is that I don't see any obvious flaws in ESR's book, and if there are, indeed, a buttload of flaws, then I'd like to know about them. Couldn't Aaron be bothered to provide even one example of TAOUP's presumed horrendousness? I mean, sure, he's entitled to his opinions. But his manner of dismissing the entire book in one parenthetical sentence is, at best, questionable.

Possibly Useful Words

As you might guess, I've been playing with Dissociated Press:

• abnormail
• accidemocracy
• difficular
• discordicates
• enyachtenment
• forgious
• hostilligence
• informatiously
• kinkremental
• looney-tooling
• moronspiring
• pandervatives
• particumented
• pornogregation
• presidevil
• Prohibitchen
• reputaterialism
• revolitics
• shoutlawing
• spectrographiconoclerical
• televirulent
• therapeutimobile
• thincipia
• wiculouse
• worticulable

Terminator 3

It's pretty good. I liked the cute terminator -- every time she climbs out of a pile of wreckage, she looks so adorably indignant: the combination of sweet little voice and ice-cold facial expressions worked rather well. Arnold's good, too.