Saturday, August 21, 2010

Take it Easy and Observe Netiquette

"THIS IS NOT BASED ON A JOURNAL ARTICLE SO IT'S NOT CALLED 'HARD MODE'"

Dork. Where's your Netiquette? You have violated RFC 1855.2.1.1, 16th bullet point: Use mixed caps!

"SORRY MY CAPS LOCK IS BROKEN"

Netiquette is the minimum rules for civilized "behavior" when doing something "public" on the Internet, the mixed-cap "rule" being one of them.

Public means emailing, blogging, commenting, posting, publishing, status-messaging, twittering, MMORPG-ing, whatever.

However, Googling is private. A second party is not involved, so you can ask Google whatever you want. Emailing yourself is private. Fapping is also private.

That big Wiki teaches us that Netiquette was born simultaneously with the first ever newsgroups and BBS's during the late 70s and early 80s, but it was only sort-of "codified" by the IETF (an independent body of geeks and wizards devoted to making Internet standards) in 1995, in RFC 1855.

The full, original text of RFC 1855 can be found here.

Netiquette assumes that there's another "person" who will be affected by your combination of keystrokes. Might as well, unless IBM finally makes the computer that passes the Turing Test. But looking at a webpage simply, it's all just a collection of words, images, hyperlinks, and now videos.

No comments: