Tuesday, January 30, 2007

"< /Hate>"

Blatantly stolen from from the Volokh Conspiracy - but it does make an interesting point about sending mixed messages.
< /Hate>
I spotted a T-shirt at school bearing this inscription, but I don't think it quite means what some people assume it means.

I take it that it's supposed to mean "end hate." But when you use a tag like , you don't mean "end italics" in the sense "abandon italics forever." You mean "I've been using italics for a bit, I'm stopping for a while now, but I'll get back to using it later."

Substitute "hate" for "i," and you'll get my drift. I bet the guy has a T-shirt in his closet that he was wearing three days before; he's hated all the stuff between then and the shirt; and he'll be wearing the shirt next time he's got some hating to do. Plus he certainly wouldn't just wear the shirt without having worn before, and on the same page -- that would be syntactically non-compliant.

The comments are the best part though, who would have thought you could have a multipage discussion on the best way to say "End Hate" in a programming language. (or scripting or on a command line. whatever)

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