reversal? "supported by"

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Fri Jul 27 16:28:59 UTC 2012


I don't think so. Yahoo!Mail is a product that is designed to work in a
particular environment. Browsers are generic applications, in this
context. Yahoo! has certain features that may or may not work in a
particular browser, but it's Yahoo!'s choice, not the browser
developer's. So "support" comes from Yahoo!, not from the browser developer.

It's like saying that Application X is supported on MS Vista and XP, but
not Windows 7 or higher--which could be expressed as "X supports Vista
and XP". The application developer has to "support" its creation, not
Microsoft. There is no "reversal". The product developer supports
specific environments--the environment developers have no obligation to
support someone else's product. "Support" in all these cases means that
the developer guarantees its product to work and is committed to
resolving problems in supported environment (but not in unsupported ones).

     VS-)

On 7/27/2012 11:48 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> An error message at Yahoo Mail advises that  "Temporary errors can be
> caused by browsers that are not supported by Yahoo! Mail. "
>
> Shouldn't that be just the opposite: "that do not support...."?
>
> If so, what the hell is going on with these things?  Some kind of weird
> national dyslexia thing?
>
> JL

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