Slashdot Mirror
On the Humble Default
Hugh Pickens sends along Kevin Kelly's paean to the default. "One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default. 'Default' is a technical concept first used in computer science in the 1960s to indicate a preset standard. ... Today the notion of a default has spread beyond computer science to the culture at large. It seems such a small thing, but the idea of the default is fundamental... It's hard to remember a time when defaults were not part of life. But defaults only arose as computing spread; they are an attribute of complex technological systems. There were no defaults in the industrial age. ... The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. ... Choices materialize when summoned. But these abundant choices never appeared in fixed designs. ... In properly designed default system, I always have my full freedoms, yet my choices are presented to me in a way that encourages taking those choices in time — in an incremental and educated manner. Defaults are a tool that tame expanding choice."
Really? HTML formatted vs "plain old text" made sense to me.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Except that "Plain Text" still allows all the same HTML tags, and does a lousy job of formatting line breaks.
Red Foreman! You leave that boy alone!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Except that it doesn't seem to do line breaks at just CR/LF. Every time I've tried to use it, I get extra line breaks in unwanted places.
I love blank-line-implies paragraph, and code to that principle all the time.