Absolutes

A great post by Joe Clark: It's been 14 years. Can't people learn how to link?

Go read it.

Some people think that things like this are just a matter of opinion. That reasonable people can disagree about it. That each side of the argument is equally valid. This is wrong. There are many things in the world for which one answer is the obviously correct one, and all other alternatives are wrong. This is one of those. Here are some more things that are absolute and universal:

• Numbered footnotes[1] in blog posts or articles that are not links. Each number refers to an item in a list of links that appears at the end of the post. The mind reels. Because this is so wrong.
• Comments in reverse-chronological order (newest appearing first, and the earliest comment at the bottom of the page). You have to scroll down and up, down and up, down and up to read the comments. I think The Guardian does this, among many others. It's wrong. CBC story comments sort this way by default, but there is an option to change it to be First to Last. The question is, what other order makes any kind of useful sense? Blogger archive pages (including those of this blog) are in the wrong order and it bothers me.
• Top-posting when replying to e-mail. If you think this is OK then you're wrong.
• HTML e-mail is not OK. Multipart/alternative with a plain-text section is closer to being OK but not quite there.
• I prefer vi to emacs, but using either is fine. Something like notepad.exe or wordpad.exe is only good for writing rambling, incoherent nonsense.

Non-computer/internet:

• The proper way to eat a banana. There is only one correct way. Learn it. If you don't know the right way to peel a banana ask someone who looks smart.
• Ale is better than Lager. It's true. This is my conclusion after exhaustive sampling over many years. But isn't this a matter of taste? No. Ale is better than Lager.
• Riding around with a squeaky bicycle chain is not acceptable. Oil it.
• There is a very narrow range of acceptable ways to stack dishes in a dishwasher or on a dish drying rack. Random order of insertion and haphazard ad hoc stacking is not OK.