Clarifications
I do not consider myself a journalist. Despite of this, every now and then, my blog takes on characteristics of more traditional online (and real world) publishing. I wrote a short blurb yesterday on YesLogic, who in my view were spamming the W3C www-style mailing list.
This morning my mail box contained a message by Michael Day from YesLogic. I have taken the liberty to reproduce the message below. (Double quotes have been replaced with single quotes, and the message has been edited for whitespace.)
Subject: YesLogic Prince announcement
Hello,
Following our recent release announcement for YesLogic Prince on the W3C CSS mailing list I noticed that you described this on your website as 'spamming the list'. This is not entirely correct, as spam is unsolicited email, but our product announcements are welcomed by the CSS mailing list administrator as they are related to the ongoing development of CSS.
While it is true that it was an announcement regarding a commercial product, we believe that it was a fairly unintrusive post that was relevant to topics under discussion in the CSS community. In particular, this release of our product implements several CSS properties which are still experimental and likely to change in future revisions of the working drafts. As a CSS implementer, we provide feedback on the implementation of experimental properties to the working group, and participate in the discussion of extensions to CSS.
We also provide a free personal license for our product, which allows CSS enthusiasts to experiment with new features that browsers have not yet implemented, such as the list ::marker pseudo-element and paged media properties.
Finally, we do not post such announcements to the list very often. I think that the recent flood of virus/worm emails that has proliferated through all of the W3C mailing lists is much more of a spam problem.
I apologise for any inconvenience our announcement has caused you.
Best regards,
Michael Day
My view
Michael feels that his message to the list was not spam. I don't wish to claim my view is the absolute truth, but here's why I claimed it was spam in the first place:
- The W3C Spam Policy states the following:
As the fora hosted at W3C are focused primarily on technical, operational, or communications issues, any commercially-focused e-mail is likely to be interpreted as spam.
- YesLogic used the W3C's property to distribute an advertisement. I doubt YesLogic paid the W3C for the storage of the message, sending it out to numerous recipients, and the electricity consumed in the process. Traditional advertisement by mail forces the sender to pay for the costs of the advert, but in the case of spam the recipient pays.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this blog are mine and mine alone. I am in no way affiliated with the W3C, nor do my views represent the views of the W3C. I do not wish to impose my own views upon others, so please make up your own mind about this issue.
And in totally unrelated news...
I found a link to my blog on a Fistful of Euros under the heading Life in Europe
. I'm quite flattered that a high-profile blog like AFOE feels me worthy of such recognition. Thanks guys (David!)