W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > public-html@w3.org > November 2007

Re: Feedback on the ping="" attribute (ISSUE-1)

From: Geoffrey Sneddon <foolistbar@googlemail.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:07:50 +0000
Cc: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>, Jon Barnett <jonbarnett@gmail.com>, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu>, Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Message-Id: <009E6ECC-10AF-4501-8D4A-A22E4AD5F946@googlemail.com>
To: "Philip Taylor (Webmaster)" <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>


On 12 Nov 2007, at 18:40, Philip Taylor (Webmaster) wrote:

> Daniel Glazman wrote:
>> Jon Barnett wrote:
>>> Users do indeed know the difference between a GET and a POST after  
>>> the
>>> fact - when they press the refresh button or the back button.
>> BWAHAHAHAHA !!!!! That must be a joke. Not only they don't know the
>> difference, but they don't even know what's a GET.
>> Normal people don't even make the difference between the Web and the
>> Internet, come on !
>
> Normal people don't understand the difference
> between a Diesel engine and a petrol engine,
> but they still know the importance of putting
> the correct fuel in each.

I fail to understand this metaphor… I doubt very much that the normal  
person knows the importance of using a GET request versus a POST  
request. Such a metaphor assumes they even know there are multiple  
types of request. If you were to ask a normal person a question such  
as, "What's the importance of using a POST request not a GET request  
in HTTP?" (the least technical way to question this as far as I can  
see, as the petrol/diesel metaphor relies on people knowing what the  
two are as well), you'd get answers including:

- "Huh?" (from a guy who has been around developers for years, but is  
not a developer himself)
- "Security? Reliability?" (from a software developer, who has had one  
or two things to do with HTTP over the years)
- "emm i really have no clue either sorry" (from a 15/16 year old  
British school pupil)

Nobody really knows the importance of either. Some software developers  
have little clue, yet alone normal users.


--
Geoffrey Sneddon
<http://gsnedders.com/>
Received on Monday, 12 November 2007 20:08:10 UTC

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