mnot’s blog

"This"?

"This"?!

A little bit of link context can be a good thing, especially if following a link requires a 19.5 MB download and software installation, just to find out the title of a song.

Interesting — I don’t get complaints when I post the occasional link to a sound file or a movie, even though it takes similar efforts to be able to understand, and then actually acquire, such information.

OTOH, it’s not reasonable for people with mobile browsers to access much of the information on this site, and I don’t hear a whisper about it.

Could it be that there’s a “natural” profile of media types that people equate with “the Web”? Is this a good thing?

The flames of my inferiority complex almost never get fanned by [This example.org/tunes/some-band/atomato.mp3] or [Some Band's Atomato example.org/123a4cfa7/2e412.foo]. It was just the combination of Mac-ness (yeah, there's a Windows version, but 19.5MB?) and the hours of dialup-downloading it would take for me just to get the joke that triggered me (since I wasn't bright enough to look at the URL for your post, which I presume is also the song title). Pay no attention to my whining.

As to a natural profile of media types, I'd think it's mostly "what I already have something installed to handle."