(There is a non-negligible chance that I will be so nervous about the possible contents of replies to this mail that I will not end up ever reading them. I am occasionally subject to bouts of unreasoning terror about such things.) On 2020-07-31 at 05:28, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote: > I know, I know. My signature is minimalistic: officially there > SHOULD be a newline after the space after the dash after the --uh-- > dash. > > I skip this newline. It's a quirk. I expect a teaspoon or two of > Postel's Principle [1] applied to me as I grant it to everyone else. > [1] I know... again. There are people who don't really like Postel's > Principle. I do. I do not want to discuss with you. I too like Postel's Principle [1], and I generally apply it to scopes within my control (including this one), or at least try to do so. However, that principle has two halves, and the "send" side is no less important than the "receive" side. I have never heard of, much less am in a position to use, any mail / etc. software which supports detecting and reacting appropriately to the variant of signature delimiter which you are apparently choosing to use. Not all of the software which I use, and potentially not any of it, is something whose behavior is within my scope of control to change in this regard. (Plus, this delimiter is something which is considerably more likely to appear in an actual message body than is the standard [2] delimiter, such that adding support for it would be likely to break things.) By choosing to use such a variant rather than the standard form, you are (apparently deliberately) choosing to not be interoperable with existing software. To me, that does not appear to be consistent with Postel's Principle; you are not being conservative in what you emit. I find it hard to see how "personal idiosyncrasy" (i.e., "quirk") can be enough to excuse this. The effect is very minor in this case, and no worse than the (numerous) people who - whether by choice, by ignorance, or by software limitation - do not use a signature delimiter at all (especially since part of the boilerplate which should be considered the signature - the word "Cheers" - is being placed *before* the delimiter, and so would have to be deleted by hand from a reply anyway). Both the principle and the minor real-world effect, however, remain. I am posting not so much because of your signature delimiter itself or because I can't "be liberal in what I accept" in this regard as because I am genuinely startled by your position on this, and even more by your apparent position in regard to discussing it and the whys of it and so forth. Of all the people whom I have seen more than briefly active on this mailing list in the last several years, you would have been literally the *last* I would have expected to see behave like an asshole other than by accident - even behind myself. (And now I'm nervous about the possibility that this will somehow escalate to the point of mods shutting down the subthread for being offtopic and pushing the Code of Conduct, with the use of that word as part of the reason meaning specific consequences - even if only a reprimand - directed at me. This is probably overreaction, but it's still true.) > (And please: take this all with a grain of salt). I'm honestly not sure what you mean by this, in this context. To take something with a grain of salt is to keep in mind the possibility that it might not actually be true, and in this context, that reads to me as "don't take this seriously, I don't necessarily actually mean it" - but everything else you're saying here seems to indicate that you *do* mean it, so discounting it on that basis would seem inapplicable. I've had to check the calendar at least twice in the course of writing this mail, just to make sure that this wasn't somehow April Fool's Day or some other joke-based reason why you might be doing this without actually being serious about it, since that's the only reason I can think of why you would advise to not believe what you're saying while still bothering to actually stick with the position in this way. If you genuinely are serious about this, then I have lost a level of the respect I had for you. [1] "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle [2] "Standard" in this context as in, defined by RFC. In this case, that's RFC 3676: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block#Standard_delimiter https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3 -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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