The 4-line limit to E-mail Signature Blocks and Accessibility
Shlomi Fish
shlomif at iglu.org.il
Fri Mar 18 08:41:16 UTC 2011
Hi all,
The so-called "McQuary limit" for signatures says this:
http://www.answers.com/topic/mcquary-limit-computer-jargon
<quote>
[from the name of the founder of alt.fan.warlord; see warlording.] 4 lines of
at most 80 characters each, sometimes still cited on Usenet as the maximum
acceptable size of a sig block. Before the great bandwidth explosion of the
early 1990s, long sigs actually cost people running Usenet servers significant
amounts of money. Nowadays social pressure against long sigs is intended to
avoid waste of human attention rather than machine bandwidth. Accordingly, the
McQuary limit should be considered a rule of thumb rather than a hard limit;
it's best to avoid sigs that are large, repetitive, and distracting. See also
warlording.
</quote>
Now some people have taken the rule to its letter and put signatures only
under 4 lines. For example a typical signature (now quite old) by Hackers-IL's
Nadav Har'El is:
<quote>
Nadav Har'El | Monday, Sep 6 2004, 20 Elul 5764
nyh at math.technion.ac.il |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |May you live as long as you want - and
http://nadav.harel.org.il |never want as long as you live.
</quote>
I've been thinking that maybe such two-column and ASCII-art-bases signature is
not very accessible to people using screen-readers and/or Braille-devices
(e.g: people who are blind or otherwise sight-disabled.) and possibly has
other accessibility issues. And I've seen much worse signatures in the olden
days of Usenet.
Now, the format of my signature block is:
<block>
[Name] [Homepage URL]
[Self-interetst resource that may be of Interest one line - now randomised ]
[Empty Line]
[Amusing quote - usually by myself or a friend - now also randomised.]
[Empty Line]
Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
</block>
I think this is the most accessible solution, and the signature is still not
very long. I originally had the contact-me URL there as well, but figured out
that people can always find it on my home site.
I'd like to ask the opinion of people on this list about the accessibility
issues of this.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
P.S: according to https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/shlomif , I have written well
over 100K lines of open-source source code to allow me to add 10 lines to my
signature, above 4 lines, though I'm using much less than 14 lines for a
signature at the moment.
--
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Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
The Case for File Swapping - http://shlom.in/file-swap
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