[HN Gopher] Prof. Dr. Style (2010)
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Prof. Dr. Style (2010)
Author : bschne
Score : 43 points
Date : 2022-01-07 12:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (contemporary-home-computing.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (contemporary-home-computing.org)
| skywal_l wrote:
| 2010
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _Prof. Dr. Style: Top Web Design Styles of 1993 (2010)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18440935 - Nov 2018 (4
| comments)
| Tomte wrote:
| I kinda like "Prof. Dr. mult.".
|
| Usually only happens with "Prof. Dr. hc. mult.", but there are
| exceptions where people hold several "real" doctorates.
|
| Back when I was at university there was one professor who didn't
| use that convention and had "Prof. Prof. Prof. Dr. rer nat. Dr.
| Ing." or something similar. That was certainly excessive.
| Tomte wrote:
| And an anecdote:
|
| A bit over twenty years ago I was a young CS student who had
| volunteered to maintain our "commented directory of lectures"
| (kommentiertes Vorlesungsverzeichnis) with two other students.
|
| A directory where all the lectures, seminars etc. were listed,
| with a short abstract what would be covered. This was student-
| led, but basically everyone used it over the "official"
| directory, and we got computer resources and some small payment
| for doing so.
|
| When we took over we inherited a convoluted system of Perl(?)
| scripts and some database.
|
| We were mailing professors for information about their courses,
| mailing reminders, and so on. This was all semi-automated. Oh
| boy!
|
| Professors were really helpful, fast to reply, with high-
| quality abstracts of their lectures. Except one.
|
| We had decided to include other departments' lectures that were
| cross-listed in our department, so it was a professor we had
| never met.
|
| Silence. Absolute silence, we never got a reply.
|
| Until after maybe three mails and a few weeks his secretary
| sent us a nasty mail: how dare we insult this professor, an
| absolute authority in his field, with such an inadequate style
| of address?
|
| We were perplexed. Our mails used the official address "Sehr
| geehrter Herr Professor X".
|
| (It sounds weird in English, if you translate it literally it's
| "Most revered Mister Professor X".)
|
| We looked up the mails we had sent them. And were aghast. The
| mails to this professor (and thankfully only this one) started
| with "Sehr geehrter X" (double space). Check your database
| entries for NULL, dummy!
|
| Yes, our mail was unprofessional. We should have handled the
| database part better.
|
| But this professor was really out of line. Who thinks such an
| address would be anything else but a mistake and take it so
| personal as to sick his secretary on us in such a way? "Our"
| professors would have simply ignored that faux-pas, a few of
| them would have had a very entertaining riposte, I'm sure, but
| certainly no bad blood.
|
| How did it end?
|
| We apologized profusely. Never got an reply to that, either. So
| we simply dropped the lecture from the directory and it wasn't
| included. We made sure he would never get another mail from us.
| Nobody ever complained.
| ectopod wrote:
| If the professor had a secretary it's possible he never saw
| the email. Some employees like to bask in the reflected glow
| of their boss's high status (as they see it) and are very
| sensitive to perceived slights.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I thought it was an exclusively German thing to double-up titles
| like these people are - but this page makes it seem like people
| are doing it world-wide.
| OJFord wrote:
| In the UK 'Professor' takes precedence (and isn't abbreviated?
| If it were it would be without the full stop (aka 'period')) -
| even if someone managed to become a professor at a chartered
| university without a doctorate it's just irrelevant at that
| point. Titles can be 'doubled-up' if they convey different
| things though, for example a knighted professor would be
| Professor Sir/Dame (male/female).
|
| Debrett's used to have some nice public web pages on this &
| similar, but it seems to have been removed or paywalled.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > even if someone managed to become a professor at a
| chartered university without a doctorate it's just irrelevant
| at that point
|
| There's quite a few professors without doctorates -
| doctorates didn't used to be the done thing until relatively
| recently. Typical example on HN would be Simon Peyton-Jones
| who is a professor but doesn't have any kind of doctorate.
| OJFord wrote:
| I didn't mean it to be 'if that ever happens', if that's
| how it sounded, just that when it does, they've surpassed
| what Dr conveys in a way, so it's not necessary to
| distinguish doctored professors from those that aren't.
|
| It probably also contributes to this that it's achieved
| more readily in the US, 'professor' conveys a much more
| senior position in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ac
| ademic_ranks_in_the_United_K...
|
| (Although not at Cambridge any more, according to the
| section above that linked.)
|
| I recall a few having email signatures that also mentioned
| their equivalent US title, perhaps having had trouble being
| taken seriously enough in transatlantic collaborations, I
| don't know!
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| That's interesting info.
|
| There's a view that I lightly hold, and I'd welcome to hear
| others' perspectives on it:
|
| I find myself a bit salty regarding social norms regarding
| honorifics. Maybe because my first instinct is that it caters
| to pretensions and is anti-egalitarian (in a certain sense).
|
| To me it feels similar to when people insist on using
| special, quirky names for various groups of animals, e.g. a
| "murder" of crows. Some see it as fun, but to me that fun is
| tainted by some persons being snobbish. I.e., they prefer a
| version of English whose complexity allows them to be
| condescending regarding it's "proper" diction.
|
| Any reasons I should feel otherwise?
|
| (This is an earnest question. I'm sure my view needs more
| balance.)
| iaabtpbtpnn wrote:
| Academia is all about prestige. You gotta let them have it,
| it's the main thing they care about.
|
| But you're right about names for groups of animals, called
| "terms of venery", were originally intended to mark a
| speaker as educated enough (in hunting traditions) to know
| the words, not for serious communication about animals.
| OJFord wrote:
| > Academia is all about prestige. You gotta let them have
| it, it's the main thing they care about.
|
| That couldn't be further from my experience, I almost
| always emailed 'Dr Blah', because it just seemed correct
| to me, but they'd sign off 'Tom' (or whatever).
| p_l wrote:
| There is a question of system - in some countries, "professor"
| is a separate title convened by national body, and is separate
| from whatever status you have at your individual teaching
| organization - for example, in Poland, we have "professor
| extraordinary", which is lower rank and convened by specific
| university and not valid outside, and "professor ordinary",
| which is presented to you by president after recommendation
| from scientific body - and is valid everywhere. Both of those
| titles require having a second-level doctorate (meaning you
| also did a "habilitation"), but are separate titles and when
| writing it down formally you're supposed to write them
| separately
| jvandonsel wrote:
| As a native English speaker, this page is nearly incomprehensible
| to me.
| nomorecommas wrote:
| The title is incomprehensible to me. The page itself won't load
| in my browser. Possibly net problems, or a bad cert.
| canjobear wrote:
| The writing is hard to follow but I think the point is you can
| find a lot of old-style websites by searching for "Prof. Dr."
|
| Or at least you could in 2010
| john-doe wrote:
| I started collecting examples of what I call "The New Prof. Dr.
| Style" that shares most of the design constraints/principles of
| the original, but is mobile-friendly:
|
| - https://urcad.es/
|
| - https://jonathontoon.com/
|
| - https://web.archive.org/web/20210126115413if_/https://maxhaw...
| (archived)
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> They look according to the viewer's browser settings. This
| reveals the belief of the early 1990es that any visual design
| should be left at the discretion of the user.
|
| I remember first reading about HTML in _Byte Magazine_. The idea
| was that the tags were supposed to reflect the organization of
| the text, but not much more, so that your browser could render it
| according to your preferences. This included the possibility of
| special browsers for the blind, etc. When I finally got a chance
| to create a personal web page, that 's how I designed it, and I
| still do so today. On the one hand, it looks great nowhere, but
| never fails to be intelligible on any browser, device, OS
| revision, etc. I never have to test it on more than one platform.
|
| Today, web design treats the browser as a general purpose
| graphical display, which means you have to consider every
| possible corner case of every browser and display size. It means
| that web pages can be as bad as software, because they _are_
| software. It means that making good web pages requires sweating
| the details to the same extent as good software, which is
| phenomenally labor intensive and consequently, rare.
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