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Re: [ITP] neon (A WebDAV library required by Subversion)


On Mon, 3 May 2004, Robert Collins wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 21:56, Max Bowsher wrote:
> > Reini Urban wrote:
> > > Max Bowsher schrieb:
> > >> sdesc: "An HTTP and WebDAV client library"
> > >
> > > ===== neon =======
> > > sdesc: "A HTTP and WebDAV client library"
> > >
> > > ===== libneon24 =======
> > >> sdesc: "Runtime library component of Neon - an HTTP and WebDAV client
> > >> library"
> > >
> > > sdesc: "Runtime library component of Neon - a HTTP and WebDAV client
> > > library"
> >
> > I disagree, and so does the neon website.
>
> And you're both wrong. An Apple, A Car.
>
> Rob

Or "an Aych-Tee-Tee-Pee"...  Acronyms can go by either spelling or
pronunciation.  I hate to get in on what's essentially a grammatic
discussion, but I'd say the W3C has the final authority on the matter...
Or it would, if it could be consistent enough.  E.g. [rfc2626 = HTTP/1.1]:

$ wget -q -O- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt | sed 's/\(an\? http\)/\n\1/ig' | grep -i 'a http' | wc -l
      5
$ wget -q -O- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt | sed 's/\(an\? http\)/\n\1/ig' | grep -i 'an http' | wc -l
     68
$

So, the jury's still out on this one.  The majority seems to lean Max's
way, FWIW, and is on the increase (the score for rfc1945 [HTTP/1.0] was
4/23 [a/an]).  IMO, if Tim Berners-Lee can use "an", who are we to argue? ;-)
	Igor
-- 
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     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

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