[1] Subject: infelicities & betterments
From: Willard McCarty <mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca>
Size: 18 lines
[2] Subject: Humanist WWW pages
From: Andrew Burday <andy@dep.philo.mcgill.ca>
Size: 30 lines
[3] Subject: HUMANIST
From: lanjh1@bonaly.hw.ac.uk
Size: 12 lines
-[1]-------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Willard McCarty <mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca>
To: mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 21:21:28 -0400
Subject: infelicities & betterments
Dear Humanists:
You may have noticed that messages from Humanist are coming as if they were
from me personally. As one of you already pointed out, having "Humanist" as
the sender is preferable, since then one can sort (even delete!) messages
without having to look at them. My colleagues at CIT (Princeton) are
changing the name of the editor's account to "Humanist Editor" from "Willard
McCarty", but apparently it takes time for the change to be circulated.
I'm attempting to cultivate a certain amount of ignorance about how to edit
Humanist so that my old preferences do not obscure new realities. Your
patience and suggestions while I bumble along will be appreciated.
Someone wrote me a note saying that he hoped Humanist wouldn't be primarily
published on the Web. It won't, as I thought my opening message made clear.
I like the Web as much as the next fellow, but Humanist is a forum, not a
bulletin board. Once the traffic reaches a certain density, I will likely
begin posting announcements and other non-conversational mail on a Humanist
web page made for the purpose, but for now, as I said, I'm feeling my way along.
Thanks for your help with the resurrection.
WM
Editor
-[2]-------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Andrew Burday <andy@dep.philo.mcgill.ca>
To: mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU, cgfox@rci.rutgers.edu
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 12:48:27 -0500 (GMT-0500)
Subject: Humanist WWW pages
Gentlemen:
I'm pleased to see that Humanist is back in operation, and that it has a
web server. I was particularly happy to see the effort you've made to
accomodate text browsers such as lynx. (Incidentally, is there any
reason why the editor's announcement mentioned *only* lynx and graphical
browsers? It looks to me as if your pages should render fine in any text
browser. I realize lynx is the most popular, but unsophisticated users
of other text browsers might take your message to mean that their
browsers won't work with the Humanist pages.)
I'd like to make one suggestion about the pages, though. Most HTML style
guides say that pages should have a clearly designated author, but yours
appear not to. (I must admit I did not look at many of your pages, as I
found the Princeton server very slow.) This can be done either with an
<address> container at the bottom of the page, or with a <link> tag in the
header. The latter would look like this:
<link rev="made" href="mailto:mccarty@phoenix.princeton.edu">
This clearly defines a way to contact the author for each page, whereas
for this note I had to take your addresses from the humanist.html page.
Since I was able to get in touch with you, this obviously isn't a crisis;
but it would be better style to define an author for each page.
Thanks for your work on Humanist.
Best Wishes,
Andrew Burday
********************************************************************
andy@philo.mcgill.ca http://www.philo.mcgill.ca/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not
to seem worth stating, and to end up with something so paradoxical
that no one will believe it."
Bertrand Russell, 'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism'
*********************************************************************
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From: lanjh1@bonaly.hw.ac.uk
To: mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 13:41:05 +0100
Subject: HUMANIST
A quick message to say I'm delighted HUMANIST is back on-line: I have missed it
a lot in the interregnum. In particular, it was what you referred to as the
ludic and serendipitous elements which I enjoyed most about HUMANIST, and I
hope they will continue to operate. I also hope you will not switch over
entitely to the WWW, as I only have access to old-fashioned E-mail: when the
fibre-optic cabling was installed in the campus, our building was somehow
forgotten about. It wasn't a problem at the time, because we didnt't have any
computers, let alone E-mail, but now it is a real headache and a constant
source of frustration.
I'd also like you to know that your efforts as editor are much appreciated: it
must be a very time-consuming task.
With all best wishes from Jim Halliday at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.