Use of Foul Language on a Public Site

[GeorgeLangley]

I have found this site of immense use, that I want to add it to a list of resources for an educational presentation. But am I loathe to do so when there is foul language on it. For example, "to prevent people from just making 'stuff' up" on the semantics page:

http://diveintohtml5.info/semantics.html

is unnecessary and is easily replaced with a more-appropriate "to prevent people from just making their own rel values". This would increase the value and legitimacy of this resource. Thank you.

[danielfilho]

@SlexAxton I just suggested that on the IRC. A branch without "foul language" and an option on the website.

+1 on that :)

[dstufft]

I don't particularly care if the resource curses or not, but I think that both the change and the original should be argued for on their own merits. What Mark Pilgrim would or wouldn't want shouldn't matter anymore.

[DavidBradbury]

I like the idea of forking an academic version, and would be glad to help with it. That said, I think this is also a good time to possibly define long term goals (or if there is already such a document, review them and see how this may affect or reflect those goals).

[maxfenton]

"the original does not need to be changed to suit my tastes."

[jakearchibald]

Hmm, people might not take to the idea of forking because it "sounds a bit rude" :trollface:

[jonathantneal]

A couple of questions for my friends @paulirish and @kennethreitz

Did I fork this work when I started this project? Did I explicitly write my intentions in the second paragraph of the website?

I have previously mentioned that I will not get into a revert war. I explained my decisions, what I thought I did right and wrong, and I asked you guys to talk about it. I've received a blast of emails, tweets, and private messages from people very upset with me, but I'd like to talk to you guys about it. Paul, you're on IRC. Let's talk. Kenneth, we have messaging on GitHub if you don't want to get on chat or IRC. Let's talk.

[ghickman]

-1.

It seems trivial to maintain a "clean" version if that's what people would like to do while keeping this version in the spirit of Mark and making it the canonical document.

My two cents on changing this document too far would be to look at it in comparison to another well known document of similar ilk, Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. Given that _why left behind the Ruby community but his works remained this seems like a fitting document to compare with. It's a guide filled with all sorts of kooky images and dialogue that has a distinctive style and has been an entry into Ruby for many programmers. Ask yourself this: if someone wanted to remove the images or kooky dialogue from that document would it change the original tone? Would it change the fundamental nature of the document?

This entire thread seems based on people's different opinions towards certain words and destined to end up with a "clean" fork either way. @jonathantneal, @GeorgeLangley why not spearhead the community that wishes to maintain the clean fork?

[mitsuhiko]

Just don't get offended. Is it that hard?

[sturobson]

I'm finding it bizarre that anyone thought to edit the 'naughty words' out of it when their time could have been spent building something more helpful. Keep the rude and lewd's in please.

[gryzzly]

Make your own website about HTML5 and don't use “foul” language there. I love “foul” language. That's emotional. That adds color and taste to the read.

It's either maintained copy of author's work or it's not. If it's not, then don't do it under Mark's name, credit him and that's it.

[zachleat]

This should be handled by individual user agents. See https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cgncneknljcfojiedmehojdlenlajkbh

[reinh]

If we're going to edit out the profanity, we should replace occurrences with edited-for-TV versions to highlight just how ludicrous this sort of censorship / executive meddling is. Perhaps something like:

I apprehended the accused and advised him of his rights. He replied, 'Why don't you ram it up your pimhole, you fusking clothprunker.'

— A Bit of Fry and Laurie

[valpackett]

How the fuck just using words like “fuck” can be offensive?! They're not used in relation to any person here. How something that's not about people can be fucking offensive?

@jonathantneal, write your own fucking book if you don't like this.

[briancurtin]

This is real?

[elbowdonkey]

Belgium.

[amerine]

@elbowdonkey Belgium sucks.

[reinh]

As always, The Big Lebowski says it best:

This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps.

— Walter Sobchak

[jayphelps]

@reinh This is what happens when you feed a stoner scrambled eggs!

[obfuscurity]

Censorship is alive and well.

[ryanleland]

Words like "shit" are only offensive if they were directed towards at another person or thing in a derogatory way. I find needless censorship offensive, and I wouldn't want to enable it.

[jonathantneal]

@obfuscurity If I wanted little kids to read Dive Into HTML5 I would have removed the long words.

When we fork any project, a bit of our personalty goes into that fork, sometimes beyond typos, sometimes beyond data. I put my personality into this project. In this particular instance, I wanted the words to be sweeter, less negative, and more accessible to educators.

I made the change. Kenneth reverted my change. I reverted Kenneth's change. We both reverted each other's changes because we thought the other person had made a commit too soon. Whoops. We're human. We should have talked about it. We've never had an issue like this before.

We're not mad at each other. Kenneth was concerned I might revert again, and rightly so (I did once, after all)! I hope we can handle it together.

Now ... this censorship thing (as if I were trampling on the civil rights of the people commenting here) is getting blown way out of proportion. This is a manual with a lot of personality in it, not just foul language - 0.045%. I removed one aspect of that personality in place of my own, and for that I think I am getting a harsh judgement.

People vote their conscience, leaders make decisions, and I did both.

[creationix]

I know personally that having curse words in a technical resource makes it very distracting for me. Just as distracting as trying to talk to a female coder while she's wearing skimpy clothing.

It's possible to convey strong emotions and explain topics without resorting to such tactics, it just takes more skill and knowledge of the language. Don't censor the document, improve it! Make it both interesting and vibrant while using English "The Good Parts".

[paulirish]

And because we don't need to take this thread from curse words to sexism & tech...

I think it's about time we call this issue closed. :)

[OJ]

This kind of moderation is pathetic. People have gone mad with political correctness. Leave it the way it was. If others want to strip the profanity, let them do it and maintain it in their own fork.

If I were the author of this I'd consider this a bit of an insult.

[aarondelani]

+1

The document stands without the curse/possibly offensive words. I've read the document before and found myself laughing and losing some concentration on the subject, needless to say, I was somewhat befuddled.

I think Mark's writing style is interesting enough and doesn't require the omitted words to be successful in teaching the subject.

This is an improvement, for general public use.

[ajacksified]

Let's not blow this thing out of proportion. It isn't censorship, it isn't anything other than some people think swearing adds character in a negative fashion, some people think it adds character in a positive fashion, and decisions on both sides were made too quickly.

We're beating a dead horse. Loud majority is loud. @jonathantneal isn't a bad guy here. @kennethreitz reverted the change, and the issue is closed.

:heart:

[mindcrash]

A Dive into book not written in the spirit of Mark Pilgrim is not a Dive Into book anymore, but a work on it's own. Want to write a toned down version? Please do, but do it by forking the original uncensored version; you are basically doing this anyway.

I for one think that rewriting Dive into HTML5 just to tone down the language would be just as damaging as removing any of _why's original material in the now forked Poignant guide to Ruby for whatever reason.

However for the people who are easily offended I guess it won't be much of a problem if a censored fork of the book would be published in a way Alex suggested earlier.

[MZAWeb]

Is this discussion really happening?

[bouveng]

@paulirish Here in the Philippines, words like "fuck" and "shit" are extremely offensive and will if used repeatedly towards a Filipino, get you stabbed or shot. Fork off.

[GeorgeLangley]

Hi all. The problem is that swear words lose their meaning for those who use them regularly, so of course they don't see the problem. It is akin to someone who has gotten used to stepping over a pile of dirty laundry, instead of picking up that pile and cleaning it. They fail to see how that pile reflects on them.
So, I have just one question - did Mark edit his content for offensive language when he published it through O'Reilly ("HTML5: Up and Running")? If so, then I don't see a problem doing the same to the online version, for the same reason - to reach a greater audience. And that's the point.

George Langley

On 2012-03-21, at 12:24 PM, Jonathan wrote:

First, if anyone is seriously interested in contributing to this discussion, I recommend reading http://people.howstuffworks.com/swearing.htm

I think this issue merits a real discussion. Those who enjoy the freedom of using inciting language would be very bothered by removing this and other examples of profanity in this resource, as would individuals who would like to preserve Mark's digital personality in Dive Into HTML5. However, profanity does has a strong, emotional, often discomforting and absolutely measurable psychological impact on individual, though it wouldn't require science to acknowledge what "cussing" means to people who can read and hear English. Mark's words are used deliberately to express his personal frustration humorously and with mild shock value. An example follows:

Over time, the list of quirks grew, and so did the list of doctypes that triggered “quirks mode.” The last time I tried to count, there were 5 doctypes that triggered “almost standards mode,” and 73 that triggered “quirks mode.” But I probably missed some, and I’m not even going to talk about the crazy shit that Internet Explorer 8 does to switch between its four — four! — different rendering modes. Here’s a flowchart. Kill it. Kill it with fire.)

My opinion is that anything unnecessarily negative or profane should be modified so that the resource may be used by all people and all cultures and societies (as a tangent, I think the book should be translated too).

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/diveintomark/diveintohtml5/issues/20#issuecomment-4623835

[jonathantneal]

@GeorgeLangley, you do us a service, and a bunch of trolls ruin a decent discussion. @kennethreitz called for the discussion to continue, but we may need to take it off this thread.

I listened to the trolls, every one of them. They don't matter anymore. This is for the few that matter.

We don't need to consider comments like "'with contributions from the community' does not mean you get to choose his words". I wrote those words! In fact, I have been editing the human words of Mark Pilgrim's book for some time. Trolls didn't care because I didn't stomp on their cause-of-the-week until now. Mike Taylor has been hosting an unedited version of Dive Into HTML5 for some time. He was also the first major voice bringing attention to this change on Twitter. People can get this information from where they want - we don't make money off this. We do this because we care about sharing information and serving the community.

We don't need to consider posts like "fork this if you want a version without profanity". My first thought is "Good news everyone, I have a fork, and this is it." I merged my updated repo back into Kenneth's because collaboration rocks, and we change the text all of the time. One of the biggest contributors as of late is a fellow by the name of Masataka Yakura, who worked with O'Reilly Japan to publish the Japanese version of the printed book.

We can ignore remarks containing "Mark would have" or "Mark wouldn't have". We all know that Mark would have deleted this repo - or wait - he DID delete this repo! We restored this repo. We restored the website. Since we're talking about this man like he were dead and we should follow his echoing foot steps, consider that he DID remove the profanity in his own book, the very same book that our biggest contributor as of late has been working on. Mark removed it so that his book could reach a wider audience. Those commits I made he made once too.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596806033.do

In a living document, our knowledge and opinions and flavor and beliefs and direction make their way in, as they did when the text was originally written. That's what is cool about open source stuff.

[benosteen]

I can understand why you might want to create a expurgated version of the text, but please create it as a version separate from the master branch - a 'figleafed' branch perhaps.

It should be clear from those you call trolls that people have an attachment to the tone of the work as it stands. Create a version that is 'clean' in your opinion, and allow the community to compare the two.

However, you should rewrite the sentences and paragraphs these 'offensive' words appear in and not just remove or replace them. To do so, without examining the tone they conveyed, would make the text feel like there is something missing, something unsaid. This is implicit and something you can pick up by reading through the work as a whole and in context. (It is also painfully obvious in works that have been bowdlerised in the past.)

In summary, please do create a kids-friendly, cuss-free version, but don't just use regex - rewrite the whole work with your new audience in mind.

[natecavanaugh]

I think the fact of the matter is, people who feel the words should be kept are not chafing at the fact that it's swapping out one word for another, but rather they feel as if their idea of "personality" or "flavor" is being censored.

But I think they're forgoing the pragmatic consideration of wider use because of a principaled reaction to the reasoning.

But for those people, if language is such an easy thing to get over, why don't they "just get over it"?

[jonathantneal]

Most of the instances of profanity were completely detached from the flow of the document (I'd say all but one word). They were lazy. They did not offer much spice. As is such with most profanity. So what good does it do to keep something bad? It allows some to boast in their profanity. This is a cause to them, because of the way they act. I appealed to them anyway, and some of us offered resources and measurements of the psychological, social, and professional impact, and any other quantifiable impact by removing this profanity. It does nothing to satisfy the ones who think that less-than-a-percent of words, with little attachment to the whole, make up the whole of words.

[zxv]

Premature optimization is generally railed upon in technical matters. But why not here?

What problem is being solved? Is there even a problem? Has anyone encountered any specific instance of having someone denounce the entire work on the basis of something occupying (using your own numbers) a half of a tenth of a percent of the text?

I suggest that it is highly unlikely that any person would be dissuaded from pursuing the entire text as a result of such editorial trivia. The text is valuable for it's presentation of the technical matters, and I don't think that value is diminished by something so small.

Furthermore, the document's writing is expressive, and these instances are communicating palpable frustration towards the issues involved. To remove these expressions would be a disservice to the reader, as the meaning behind the expressions is compromised.

I am absolutely certain that @jonathantneal's intentions were good, but I feel that overall, this is a removal of a feature rather than fixing a bug. I will be glad to stand corrected if anyone can find a counter-example of the type I describe above.

P.S. One last point I'd like to make is that since the occurrence of these words is so small, the argument for expressiveness stands. If they were more frequent, the reader would be desensitized to them (which would would also compromise the expressiveness of the meaning being communicated).

[jonathantneal]

That's feedback I can appreciate. Thank you. It is much nicer than many of the other sentiments.

Quick answers: 1. We are discussing everything here, everything was railed here, and it became a bit of a blood bath. 2. The problem is that we are limiting distribution due to profanity, and we are being unnecessarily negative in the text. 3. The problem is evidenced by this ticket being filed, the problem is real and concerns many on both sides as evidenced by the responses (both good and bad), and we can turn to profanity laws in many countries. 4. The proof is, again, in the ticket description itself, although we may (again) reference our own censorship laws (both the good and the bad), social customs, and references to Mark Pilgrim's "HTML5: Up & Running". There's also the issue that I don't like it, and it's a few bits of a few sentences.

This is an expressive, educational work, and if this profanity is so minute, the argument for expressiveness does not stand so well, because it's clearly not a major noticeable trait. No one noticed when I did things like this before, because it went under their radar, and they didn't miss it when they came back. This manual isn't for people who can't read documentation or enjoy expression without profanity. Anyone can and is welcome to fork this projet and make their own decisions based on their own beliefs, though it is strange they would not expect the same of me. As contributing authors to this new work, our tense and character and beliefs make their way in, including the opinions that differ from Mark's. The first thing I changed was the title of the work, as well as doubling the text on the home page to explain that I would be changing the work. That text, my own text, was used against me; someone drew a comparison that I should begin feeling somewhat like George Lucas.

The reason many people (not all against this) are upset is because they love to be profane, and they choose to despise those that disagree with them, and they felt it was necessary to troll this ticket and harass me outside of these comments. If Mark chooses to bring back diveintohtml5.org and use profanity, add profanity, or remove profanity, I can not and would not stop him because it is his to do as he pleases.

I recall when Necolas forked a project of mine, normalize.css, because (as he told me later) I wasn't taking in his changes, and he removed my css expressions (ironic, they are also called expressions). His branch became the defacto branch because it was better! You'll find me in half the blame file, but Necolas deserves to the credit for being the defacto repo because he evolved it into the next thing, which turned out to be way better. That's what I'm trying to do here.

[stubbornella]

I think that removing the profanity would limit distribution in another way. To use your original example @jonathantneal:

"to prevent people from just making shit up"

The original writing is funny and engaging if perhaps a bit irreverent.

Your proposed replacement, though technically accurate, lacks personality and is somewhat dry:

"to prevent people from just making their own rel values"

There are lots of technical books that adopt text-book style writing. Let this be a bit different. I think that as much as possible the style going forward should match the original so it feels like it is all written in the same voice. I think that more people will be (quietly) put off by it being boring than by it containing a few swear words.

[Protonk]

We can ignore remarks containing "Mark would have" or "Mark wouldn't have". We all know that Mark would have deleted this repo - or wait - he DID delete this repo! We restored this repo.

I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. Or rather, I think it elides the larger issue which is less favorable to the argument of removing profanity. I'll certainly agree that Mark disclaimed all notional control when he deleted the repo and that whoever reconstituted it should be able to fashion the resource as they see fit. However when people say "this isn't what Mark would've wanted" they aren't just invoking argumentum ad Pilgrimum. They are attempting to point to the flavor and verve of the original text as a positive quality. Removing the expletives to serve a larger audience has benefits but we should recognize that doing so dilutes this original quality. We move from a resource which is managed by geeks for geeks to something which is more palatable to a wider array of people and by definition less focused, interesting and alive.

In a sense this may be unavoidable. The resource has passed from a single contributor to a group and it's audience has expanded from a core set of geeks to a broader array of people who might object to certain phrases. In which case removing the explitives is a symptom that we have given up on that original idea and allowed it to be managed by committee.

[creationix]

...doing so dilutes this original quality. We move from a resource which is managed by geeks for geeks to something which is more palatable to a wider array of people and by definition less focused, interesting and alive.

I'm sorry, but assuming that all geeks prefer expletives in their reading is simply false. It's also false to assume that that is the only way to make text "interesting" and "alive". This isn't a binary switch between vulgar-and-interersting and plain-and-boring.

...given up on that original idea and allowed it to be managed by committee.

No it's not managed by a committee, it's managed by new maintainers who have a different on the world. "This manual isn't for people who can't read documentation or enjoy expression without profanity" - @jonathantneal

I'm sure there is a fork somewhere with the original text for people who must have profanity to enjoy their reading.

[Protonk]

I'm sorry, but assuming that all geeks prefer expletives in their reading is simply false. It's also false to assume that that is the only way to make text "interesting" and "alive". This isn't a binary switch between vulgar-and-interersting and plain-and-boring.

I'm not making that assumption. I'm simply suggesting that the profanity came from someplace important to the piece and the original author. And eliminating it both removes the offensive words and takes the work away from that place. It's unavoidable. And it strikes me as unrealistic to describe removing profanity as an unambiguous improvement along all dimensions.

[DavidBradbury]

Personally, for me, it has nothing to do with enjoying profanity or not. When maintaining and adding to someone else's work, I think it is important to maintain consistency with the original style of the work. If this work had no profanity, and someone wanted to add some profanity to make it 'more enjoyable' to read, I'd be against that too.

Here is my recommendation:

1. Keep the style and formatting of the original.
2. Establish long-term goals of this project (This would prevent squabbles like this from happening in the first place)
3. If you wish to change the style or formatting of this project, fork it. It is borderline asinine to expect us to fork the original version so that others can use this page for their new project.