Subject:
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Re: Lowest Common Denominator (was: Re: Lego.com - new look)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Sun, 17 Oct 1999 19:05:50 GMT
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Reply-To:
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mattdm@mattdm&avoidspam&.org
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Viewed:
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862 times
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Todd Lehman <lehman@javanet.com> wrote:
> The funny bit about all of this is that English has at least two meanings
That's the direction I'm coming at this from. Denominator, in its non-math
sense, means "that which gives a name to something". Applied to the topic at
hand, that very logically means what sorts of documents the browser is said
to understand.
I think that if the sense of "least common sorts of content understood" is
meant, it's most clear to write "least-common denominator". (Which is
probably SuperHTML 6.43b, a non-standard dialect of HTML which I just made
up right now.) So I think a reading of "simplest content that is common to
all browsers" is probably correct, and that probably means "straight ASCII
text", which I don't think most people mean.
> What Yahoo! is probably doing is serving the "greatest number of least-
> common denominators" across situations, or, more accurately, the "union of
> the set of all least-common denominators." Something like that.
I dunno. Yahoo seems to be aiming for "content which is acceptable in most
common situations for our target audience". They're not trying to hit
greatest or least of anything. Which is probably good practice, as long as
you define "acceptable", "common", and "our target audience" well. It's also
nice to also have least common denominator (really I mean that this time)
content available -- plain text or very simple markup -- but you don't want
to design your main page that way.
<URL:http://quotes-r-us.org>
<URL:http://www.quotes-r-us.org/plain/>
> Looks like the non-math use of "lowest common denominator" goes back several
> decades, at least. I don't have an OED handy to check if it goes back even
OED doesn't give a date for it, but defines it as:
least or lowest common denominator: the lowest possible common
denominator; also attrib. and fig.
which isn't very helpful. ("denominator" in the mathematical sense goes back
to the french "dénominateur" in 1484...)
In any case, I don't care how long people have been using it incorrectly. It
doesn't seem to be a case like "lie vs lay", where the "wrong" usage should
probably just be accepted as part of the language. It's a logical error
where the phrase as commonly used just plain means something other than what
people are meaning to say.
I also think that the moving staircases that go down should be
"de-escalators", or "descalators". But that's another issue. :)
--
Matthew Miller ---> mattdm@mattdm.org
Quotes 'R' Us ---> http://quotes-r-us.org/
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