On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Dan Harkless wrote:
> > I wrote:
> > The output isn't exactly identical - for one you don't get the ugly "@"
> > after each line (yes I call it ugly, using "@" as an abbreviation for "at"
> > is not only wrong,
>
> How is it wrong? "@" is used as an abbreviation for "at" all the time.
My english dictionary, although a bit old maybe, doesn't list it at least,
but then again I'm no linguistic when it comes to the english language so
of course I shouldn't say for sure that it isn't "correct english". The
first time I saw "@" being used as an abbreviation for "at" was back in
~1995 where some english underground magazine-add were selling movies "@
£9.95" - and I thought to myself, ''well that sure sounds like a serious
company indeed''. Times do change I guess, - soon '4' will be accepted as
'for' and 'U' will be.., ah U know where I'm getting @ ;-). Anyway, if
I'm wrong, I am however pretty sure that "@" isn't used much as an
abbreviation for "at" outside english-speaking countries, if any. (And i
guess it can be hard to translate "@" (at) into something native when you
only have 1byte of space ;-) ) - then again it's all up to you of course,
I'm just rambling now I feel.
> > it doesn't look very good visually in my opinion) -
>
> Personally I'd rather optimize for display clarity than display
> attractiveness, but it's true that with the "/s" on there, the "@" isn't
> strictly necessary to make it clear the figure is a bandwidth measurement.
> I think new-percentage-patch's output may be too terse, though.
Too terse? hm.. well...
> Easy for all those unlabeled numbers to confuse non-experts.
... you have a point there of course. *sigh* I admit you have a strong
point there even. But dang, I (and I guess most people [except the really
confused novice ;-) ]) would hate to see such a good feature as knowing
how much time is left until the download is complete be left out just
because of it... Personally I think I'd almost favour that feature over
Kb/s since I can just use a network applet or whatever instead and get an
average when the download is complete. But oh well, that's just selfish
thinking and not what the userbase at large would want. Though I guess it
wouldn't be that hard to modify the new-percentage patch to suit
wget1.7-dev when it's declared stable no matter what, so I shouldn't be
whining.
> I think a bigger problem is how the current display can go over 80 columns,
> which I think is much worse than is clutter due to " @ " (though removing
> that would help the line wrap problem as well, of course).
Good luck!
Best regards
Henrik van Ginhoven, Sweden
9799-5
Everyone a story but they end the same
