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Re: Sitefinder II, the sequel...

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Thu Jul 13 12:07:02 2006

On Jul 13, 2006, at 11:35 AM, Larry Smith wrote:

Is it?  If you type "fobar" and the domain does not exist, is it rude
to return foobar?  Or is it helpful?

Hmmm, while a "good" question - how about another example,
someone mistypes whitehouse.gov - do you return the "real" whitehouse.gov or
the whitehouse.com site ???

Note: "and the domain does not exist". Whitehouse.gov absolutely exists.


As a purist, I can see saying that's wrong.  As a user, they like
easy.  Hell, most of them us Windows & Outlook, so they clearly don't
care about things like "standards".  Since they pay our bills, should
we listen to them?

Also true, and while I agree in "principle", if you transpose only two numbers
on your next deposit ticket - is it the banks responsibility to put the money
in the correct account - or is it simply your mistake??

Does the other account exist? And should the bank be checking the name <-> account # association? I would argue they should. (But know they do not.)

Either way, not really the same thing, IMHO.


Can someone show the Internet is going to collapse, or at least be
harmed, by being "rude" in this way?

I don't think the "net" is going to collapse, but I do think that many of the
"things" being done are simply "making" (allowing/enabling/ supporting) end
users to be more and more lazy or what-ever term you want to apply. In
school if you spell the word tree as tre - hopefully your teacher corrects
this. What we seem to be doing is saying it is ok to not know how to spell
or even know what or where you want to go on the net - and I am not certain
that in the long term we are not doing more "harm" than good - just as your
teacher would by allowing you to mis-spell words instead of learning the
correct way....

I think that's going a bit far.

By that token, we should lobby Microsoft to take spel chickers out of MS Word.

--
TTFN,
patrick