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 19:43:12 GMT
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Viewed:
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751 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.geek, mattdm@mattdm.org (Matthew Miller) writes:
> [...] 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.
Aha -- I think that's a key point! In numbers and divisors and factors, the
isomorphic example to "simplest thing common to all" is probably the lowest
common factor (always 1) or lowest common prime factor between a set of
numbers. 1 would be like straight ASCII text (not what is really intended),
2 would be like early HTML without centering or tables or anything fancy, 3
would be like early HTML with centering, 5, would be like 3 with tables,
etc., etc.
Oh, my brain is starting to reel in a bad way now.
> > 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.
But if they're not trying to hit the greatest total number of users, they're
at least certainly trying to maximize the area under some curve, right? :)
> 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/>
Cool example! Very fast! BTW, are those the canonical forms of the URL?
How come the second one has a www prefix and the first one doesn't?
> I also think that the moving staircases that go down should be
> "de-escalators", or "descalators". But that's another issue. :)
Ahh, cool! Same thing with elevators then. OK, from now on, when I ride a
down-escalator, I'm going to bend over and put my head between my legs so
that up is down and down is up and I'm actually being escalated! :)
--Todd
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