{"id":290,"date":"2007-02-09T00:23:26","date_gmt":"2007-02-09T08:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/?p=290"},"modified":"2007-02-09T00:24:23","modified_gmt":"2007-02-09T08:24:23","slug":"seen-on-a-mailing-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/?p=290","title":{"rendered":"Seen on a mailing list"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We are often warned against over-generalization, and on mailing lists and web fora you can almost guarantee that any statement about &#8220;all&#8221; p or &#8220;the only&#8221; p, whether p is members of some ethnic group, documents in some language, or whatever, will provoke angry responses and obscure counter examples. I&#8217;ve been on both sides of this process myself, most recently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/?p=289\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I just saw a sentence on the <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.w3.org\/Archives\/Public\/www-style\/2007Feb\/0017.html\">www-style<\/a> mailing list which made me blink:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>many authors wouldn&#8217;t bother writing web pages if they weren&#8217;t finite.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;d love to meet the authors who <span class=\"bold\">would<\/span> bother writing infinite web pages, though I suspect they might have trouble fitting me into their busy schedule.<\/p>\n<p>The only explanation I can think of is that the author had taken the lesson &#8220;don&#8217;t overgeneralize&#8221; a little bit too much to heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We are often warned against over-generalization, and on mailing lists and web fora you can almost guarantee that any statement about &#8220;all&#8221; p or &#8220;the only&#8221; p, whether p is members of some ethnic group, documents in some language, or whatever, will provoke angry responses and obscure counter examples. I&#8217;ve been on both sides of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}