Various net rants
These are various opinion pieces I've written or collected over the
years about a number of Internet related topics. "Rant" may be too
harse a word, but "net polemics" just doesn't have the right ring to
it. In addition, I have some political
rants as well listed separately.
Note: At the moment my net rants are scattered over this site,
I will try to reorganize them and make this location,
http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/ the primary entry point to
find them.
Email
- MS-Word is not a document
exchange format.
-
If ever some file format was ill-suited for Internet document
exchange it is MS-Word (any version). What started out as a short
rant has turned into a fairly extensive document. It is available in several formats.
- Mail software (and administrators) who don't know that error reports should go the the envelope
sender address
-
This is a good document to refer the clueless site administrator,
whose MTA sends non-delivery reports to addresses in the email
headers instead of using the envelope.
- Stupid Email disclaimers
- It has become fashionable in the UK in particular to put in
confidentiality notices with vague legal threats in to all
out-going email. It's silly at best.
- Abusive and misconfigured NTP
clients
- The Network Time Protocol (NTP) and the community effort to
provide time syncronization are great things. Unfortunately some
people configure their machines to use the system it what turns about
to be an abusive manner.
- anti-spam
- I've got an ever growing set of stuff regarding spam.
- Broken auto-responders which mess up
mailing lists.
-
Here is an early draft of the auto-response
rant.
- Misuse of filename information in email MIME attachments
-
How Microsoft deliberately and maliciously interprets Email
standards in a way that undermines the entire notion of
interoperability. This document isn't written yet
Web stuff
- Why web stats are worse than useless
- This is a much cited document which used to live
elsewhere.
- JavaScript is evil
-
Don't browse with JavaScript enabled; don't design pages that
require JavaScript. This document isn't written yet, and will
probably just contain links to others who have said it better than
I could.
- Visual vs Structural HTML mark-up
-
This document isn't written yet, and will probably just contain
links to others who have said it better than I could.
- Standards compliant HTML
-
This document isn't written yet, and will probably just contain
links to others who have said it better than I could.
- Behind the scenes of seamlessness
- These slides of an
ancient presentation don't really constitute a rant, but it does
talk about why it is important in cases to understand what goes on
behind the scenes in network interactions. It also fore shadows
something I really do want to rant about: Outlook Express'
mishandling of MIME. Note that there are lots of bad links in
there, but the series of slides (HTML) do work.
- Can bad design lose votes?
-
An example of a spectacular failure to properly test a very important
website.
Other people's rants
Here I list some netrants which I wish I had written, but am also
pleased that someone else has done the work. That doesn't mean that I
agree with everything that they state. This list isn't exhaustive.
- Rant by Marc Merlins against those who configure their MTAs to reject
mail with null envelopes
- I have a local copy of his
rant.
I also picked up the term "netrant" from him.
Also RFC-Ignorant.org has
a catagory for this particular bug.
- Why HTML in Email is a bad
idea.
- A rant by Thomas Gramstad which lists many of the reasons why
HTML is not a good idea for email messages.
Note that the May 2002 version of that document has
makes a common mistake, confusing "Rich Text Format (RTF)" with
"enriched text". I expect that the error will be fixed soon.
- Why Reply-to munging
is bad.
- That is a rant by Chip Rosenthal on why
email list managers shouldn't set or overwrite the "Reply-To:"
fields for their list configurations.
Version: $Revision: 1.13 $
Last Modified: $Date: 2007/03/26 16:32:04 $ UTC
First established: April 25, 2001
Author: Jeffrey Goldberg