Netiquette

What is netiquette? Netiquette is etiquette for the internet. Why do I care about netiquette? I care about netiquette for the same reason that I care about etiquette: its proper use aids in the organization of social interaction, the agreed-upon rules serving to guide the unknowing and socially inept at confusing moments, the intent being always to make situations easier for others.

If you’re reading this page because I sent you to it, you may recently have committed one of several internet faux pas. Instead of writing separate emails to each offender, explaining each breach individually, I decided simply to list my grievances in one centralized location. This is that location.

• Did you send me an html email? Please don’t! Others, notably George Dillon and Scot Hacker, have explained at length why html email is a bad idea, so I won’t elaborate except to illustrate the single thing that annoys me the most about html emails. I get a tremendous volume of email every day. Most of it is from listservs that are automatically filed into separate folders by incoming address and topic (daily news, computer, medical, politics, life in Israel), but I also get plenty of personal emails and, occasionally, spam. For me to be able to skim even half my emails in a day, I really have to maximize my email-reading productivity, and that means standardizing the conditions of email-reading so that I’ll be able to go through the emails as quickly as possible. I know what font I want, and I know what size and color I want. My eyes are adjusted to these preferences. I know I don’t want any confusing background or graphics. If your message requires pictures, big fonts or whatever, just make a website and send me the URL (with a one-paragraph description) and I will read it another time, with blogs.

  Fundamentally, my objection to html in emails is that it slows me down and makes me unable to get through as many emails in a day as I’d like. And that’s not fair to me. To combat the problem, I have instructed Mail.app not to render html emails. That means I can not read emails with hypertext markings. If you’re still sending emails like that to me, I haven’t been reading them.

• Did you write a non-standards-compliant website? What’s your problem? Web standards is not a new concept, and by now it should have spread around the whole world. If you’ve designed a site that can only be viewed in one browser, and that browser happens to be the suckiest one currently available, you are a complete fool. Do you have something against people who have something against Microsoft? Do you really want us, a growing but very prominent minority, not to be able to read what you have to say or learn about your product?
• Did you send me a large attachment without getting permission? Do you want me to shove a brick up your ass without getting permission? I own two domains and pay money to host them on a server, which means that if my computer is off and I’m not downloading my emails, they all sit online and take up space; if I go over my limit, I have to pay extra for it. This isn’t a problem with plain text emails (another reason why html emails are evil), but when you start emailing me music and high-res photos, I’m going to start thinking of ways to retaliate. If you want to share something with me, just ask for my gmail account and I will tell it to you.
• Did you send me a non-PDF text file? Then you probably don’t know what PDF is. Put very simply, “portable document format” is a way to encode a text document as an image file, so that anyone will be able to read it, exactly as you intended it to be read, on any type of computer. Besides this, PDF does not include rich text, which means the recipient won’t be able to see information such as who created the document and who else worked on it, and what changes were made before it was finalized. Free, elegant PDF readers are widely available, and because they read image files, they don’t add wavy red lines under your spelling errors (or words in foreign languages) or wavy green lines under your grammatical errors; nor will they have problems rendering text in languages, like Hebrew, that don’t use Latin characters; nor will there be any problem with graphics appearing as they are supposed to appear. Please, from now on, do not send me attachments in .doc format. Move to .pdf and don’t look back!
• Do you repeat childish spelling errors? You probably should not be allowed to access a computer in the first place. Writing u instead of “you,” 2 instead of “to” or “too” or “two,” r instead of “are,” and ur instead of “your” or “you’re,” is idiotic and, while it may save time for you, it wastes time for me as I try to figure out what you mean by u r gr8. Bottom line: I have identified the serial offenders already, and when I read something that one of them has written, if I can’t figure it out on my first try, I skip it and continue.
• Did you add me to your distribution list without asking me first? Don’t you think I realize that the person who talks the most usually has the least to say? The more you try to compel me to read what you’ve written, the more likely I am to press “delete.”

Allrighty. More coming soon.