Explaining Open Standards email attachements [summary what to send?]

[xdrudis]

I enjoyed your discussion, mostly agree with Hugo Roy and won't repeat 
arguments. 

Sam Liddicott wrote : 
> And this question: Which is your target audience?
> * Evangelist => strategic document like this message
> * Idealist => "Like the Why I rejected your attachment" link you posted
> * Pragmatist => How to communicate: A view of interoperability
> * Minimalist => Simple etiquette: How to stop your correspondents
> complaining

I'm sorry but I don't think this is helpful. You can't come and start
classiying people in groups and thinking you know everybody is one of
those patterns and you just have to decide what to tell them in order
to manipulate them to achieve your goals. That shows, and creates the 
same kind of rejection advertisement causes. You should just say what you have
to say, try to make it true, understandable and coherent, and to
summarize what's in it the best you can when you point someone to it,
and let people, in their knowledge and diversity do what they want/can
with it. If you think you are what you call an evangelist, then write
a document about what an evagenlist can tell others to help them understand
things. Not a document about what an evagelist should know, and much 
less about what an idealist, pragmatist or minimalist should know.
Assuming they exist, you don't know what they need, you only know what
you have to offer: offer it.


The rest of this mail is more general and likely offtopic, or at least
too long for the small portion on topic, so anyone reading furhter has
been warned.


I just wanted to give my opinion that I think you (maybe Sam, but
possibly more other people than intersect in part in this attitude)
are very eager to understand people and adapt to them in order to be
effective in what you try to achieve. For me this has 2 problems:

- you assume an undestanding of people you often don't have, so your
models of the people you interact with are too weak for the confidence
you put in them.  The only person you can aspire to really know is
yourself, so offering (never imposing) your views and knowledge to
others is often a safer bet than adapting to the views or knowledge
you think others have. They can think for themselves, so they'll pick
what they can use from what you tell them better than you can pick it
for them. If they don't believe all you say or do all you tell them 
it's not your failure, it's their judgement.

- you assume people are static (or you care for an interval short
enough to ignore people evolution during it). Since you care about the
present situation and want some result from your interaction, or some
present success you adapt to the present state. This may give better
results now but it may give worse results in the long run. Sometimes
you tell something to someone with the utmost care to help her
understand what you think and why you do what you do, or are what you
are, or think it is best also for her to do so, and she just thinks you
are crazy and moves along. But then she lives on, gets other inputs
and maybe the fifth person she finds with similar views makes her
change her mind in a way that wouldn't have been possible if that
was her first time hearing it, i.e. if everybody had always adapted 
too much to her.

An example: 

I myself know nothing about food, for instance. I use it every day but
I'm bad at cooking and not a gourmet at all, nor knowledgeable in
dietetics. More or less like many people are with computer science.
Yet I have vegetarian friends which are in the process of maybe
convincing me to leave meat. The first time I found one I thought it
was unpractical, likely unhealthy, odd and made no sense.  The first
arguments I didn't buy (poor animals?  why should I care more for a
life form that -like me- eats other life forms than for a purer life
form that builds life out of dead matter and raw energy? poor
vegetables !).  I was unconvenienced to find restaurants with more
diverse meals apt for my accompanying vegetarians, or having to eat
things I wouldn't have tried if I wasn't at their home but I now
appreciate the meals I've discovered I like , the habit of looking at
the menu before going into a restaurant and the later arguments (the
one about energy cost of producing meat instead of vegetables has
quite convinced me).

If every vegetarian had adapted to me and offered me only the
vegetable dishes I already liked, or come with me to the first
restaurant and eating what they could I would probably not have learnt
things I like having learnt. So I thank them for being a little
nuisance.


I may be regarded as an idealist, inflexible, antisocial or whatever,
but I think the anti-social attitude is that of only pretending to go
with the flow and accomodating others instead of sharing your
knowledge and contributing what you can to your society (and letting
others ignore you if they will). Showing yourself, teaching others to
do what you think is right (and why) and letting others ignore you or disagree
is not being stubborn or misantropist, it's being honest and confident
in the intelligence of others. And I may have no proof of that intelligence,
but I have no reason to think intelligence is not uniformly distributed,
and anyway, if people are stupid there's no solution, so let's handle 
the other case.

And I think it's perfectly fine to mix political and practical advice
in any text. What use is knowing how to do something if you don't know
why you should do it or what would the world get out of it ? What use 
is knowing what needs fixing in this world without knowing how to fix it?

But I agree we should not lead anyone to deception if we can help it.
Saying that all software works with all standards is not helpful. Saying
that it's best to choose any program that works with standards and
asking your peers to do so will help society including the person you're
telling it and you can tell them this will possibly involve more effort
for more reward than what they're doing. But it is also important to 
let them understand what doesn't work in their current practices, because
they may not know that not everybody uses their same program and version,
or that their message is being silently lost. 

A few times when I've complained of email attachments to the sender
other people that didn't complain initially have told that they
weren't able to access them either. Sometimes even all people adressed
were not reading the attachment and the sender kept thinking they did.
Many did not know the problem was the sender's choice of format, so they
didn't complain, it was simply too difficult to tell what was
happening when something in their computer didn't work.

Sorry to waste your time with my ramblings.