Geeks invented the internet. And for many years it was inhabited solely
by geeks and academics. Over those years a number of unwritten rules
arose which controlled the way people used the internet. The unwritten
rules were passed on to newcomers who saw the wisdom of the rules and
continued to follow them. Everyone followed the rules and all was well
with the world.

But
in the mid-90s the rest of the world discovered the internet and
suddenly everything changed. The companies who were providing internet
access to the public had no interest in the rules so the new users knew
nothing of the rules and continuously broke them. Some companies (and
I’m looking at you here, Microsoft) produced internet software that
encouraged users to break the rules.

This made the original
internet users very sad. Many of them fought back against this abuse of
what they saw as their system. They would try to enforce the rules but,
of course, they had no power to do so and generally failed. Which made
them even more sad.

You can’t beat that weight of numbers. The
vast majority of internet users now see the (eminently sensible in my
view) old internet rules as irrelevant to them. Most people that you
meet on the internet have no knowledge of the rules. There’s only a
tiny minority of people who still care. But many of that tiny minority
still try to fight the barbarian hordes and impose their old rules.

So
I think it’s time to give up. Much as I support the old rules, I think
it’s pointless to go on fighting this battle. It’s a battle that the
geeks can never win.

Here are three examples of rules that I think it’s time to abandon. These particular examples are all about email.

1/ Top Posting

Most
of the time email is a conversation. I send a message to you and you
send me a reply. I might then reply to your reply, clarifying some
points and asking some more questions. And so we go on.

The
sensible way to carry on a conversation like this is to format it so
that it reads like a conversation – i.e. a question followed by its
answer and then another question followed by another answer.

Geeks
know this. Their email conversations are really easy to read.
Everything is in the right order and it all makes sense. Non-geeks just
dump everything they have to say at the top of the email. This means
that firstly if you want to review everything that has been said then
you need to read from the bottom up and secondly it’s often really hard
to know which parts of the reply refer to which parts of the original
mail.

Life would be so much easier if everyone followed the geek
way of doing things. But it’s never going to happen. There are still
people holding out against this in geek communities, but most of the
world top-posts all of its replies.

And that’s not going to change. Accept it. Deal with it. Move on.

2/ HTML Email

The
same email software that initially encouraged top-posting also
introduced the wonders of HTML mail (sometimes know as “rich text”
mail) to the world. No longer would your mail be constrained to boring
old plain text – now you can change fonts and colours, and include
images.

Of course, it doesn’t really work like that. No two
email programmes work the same way and an email that looks great in
Outlook might look like a complete mess in Thunderbird (or, as is more
likely, on your mobile phone email application). As a result, people
who design HTML email (and people apparently make a living doing just
that!) have to ignore everything we’ve learned about HTML design in the
last ten years and design to the lowest common denominator. Table-based
HTML design isn’t dead; it’s been relegated to HTML email.

And
then there’s the problem with viruses and phishing. The more complex an
HTML email can be, the higher the chance that someone can use it for
nefarious purposes. The net result of that scare is that many email
programmes now won’t show external images unless specifically requested
to by the users. Which means that your carefully designed marketing
message will actually end up looking a bit shit to many of your target
audience.

But much as you might hate it (and if you’re sane you
will), HTML email isn’t going to go away. Simply set your email
application to display the plain text version of the email and let the
idiots enjoy the pretty colours and viruses. If someone sends you an
email that doesn’t have a plain text version then just ignore it. They
weren’t worth talking to anyway.

HTML email is a fact of life. Ignore it. Move on.

3/ Reply-To On Mailing Lists

If
someone sends a message to a mailing list and you reply using the
“reply” button then your reply should just go to the person who wrote
the original mail. That’s just common sense. It you want to reply to
everyone on the mailing list then you should choose “reply all” or (in
better email applications) “reply to list”.

But somewhere over
the last ten years or so, people stopped understanding that and mailing
list owners started to configure their mailing list software so that
replying to a mailing list mail sent a mail to the whole list. That’s
obviously completely broken behaviour and there aren’t many weeks that
pass when I don’t see a geek being caught out by a broken mailing list
and sending what should have been a private mail to the whole list.

Geeks
expect one behaviour. Non-geeks expect a different one. Once again the
non-geeks will win through sheer weight of numbers. I used to be
adamant about this and would configure any mailing list I ran so that
replies would go to the sender. But so many people don’t understand
that, so I have now capitulated and run most of mail mailing lists so
that a reply goes to the whole list. It’s broken and wrong, but it
leads to fewer problems in the long run.

You might think that
this is one area where geeks could still have their own way within
their own communities. Surely geeks could still run their own geek
mailing list according to the old traditions. Well, some lists are
still run like that but it seems that the inability to understand the
semantics of the “reply” button event infects geeks. Often you’ll see a
mailing list that is configured correctly gets complaints about it
being “broken” and the list owner changes the behaviour.

So now,
in the majority of cases, a reply to a mailing list mail will go to the
list. That’s not going to change. It’s not worth fighting about. Deal
with it.

So, yes, the barbarians are at the gate. The
lunatics have taken over the asylum. Good ideas have been crushed by
the number of people who don’t understand them. But there’s no point in
complaining about it. You just have to accept it and move on.

Now I’d better stop before I start ranting about Betamax.