Is it just me or does the fact the our industry consistently invents new forms of English for no real benefit bug everyone else too? I'm not taking about all jargon, some of it is very useful, reducing a complex idea or description down to a single word or phrase (e.g. it's easier to say "Backup" than "An extra copy of your work, eg documents, pictures etc, saved onto floppy disk/CD/tape, so that if your computer is stolen or breaks down you don't lose everything." ), but who came up with these gems:
- Performant - is it really so hard to say "performs well"?
- Well-formedness - er how about "the xml document is well formed" rather than "the xml document has well-formedness"!
- Outdent - obviously the opposite of indent (according to some versions of Powerpoint)
I have this vision of some committee spending pleasant lazy afternoons in a summer field dreaming up these words. They probably came up with the HTML colour names too. DarkGoldenRod anyone?