Prof. Dr. Style (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Prof. Dr. Style (2010)

contemporary-home-computing.org

46 pointsbschne18 comments

>>> 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.

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)

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.

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.

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.)

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.

> 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).

> 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.

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/Academic_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!

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

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.

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.

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.

One past thread:

Prof. Dr. Style: Top Web Design Styles of 1993 (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18440935 - Nov 2018 (4 comments)

As a native English speaker, this page is nearly incomprehensible to me.

The title is incomprehensible to me. The page itself won't load in my browser. Possibly net problems, or a bad cert.

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

2010

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