by Beware of the curse of proprietary technology!
I have learned from direct experience that using any sort of non-universal technology or web code can create large problems for you later.
If you blog, make sure you aren’t using any proprietary code to call a movie or an audio file, because if you change blogging platforms you will certainly break that code and lose functionality for your website.
I was smart to always host my images on my own server. That way, if I changed webhosts or blogging software, all my image links remained intact.
However, I was not smart enough to resist Emoticons and embedded YouTube code — and all of those calls to the technology were broken in transition.
As I clean up my messy, leftover, blogging code, I suggest hotlinking all content. Hotlinks are forever. Proprietary code is not.
Hotlinks mean your reader can click on the link for more entertainment and then decide the how and when of their interaction.
Why embed a YouTube video if you can send a reader directly to YouTube?
Emoticons, while fun, can become a crutch for hilarity — and when they’re gone, they leave behind bad, and frankly, sad trails of what used to be and what used to work.
Okay pretty interesting stuff. I say this is a warning for everyone, right. Don’t tie down to one thing you want to get out of later. Or change in the future. Keep it all on the up so you can get out.
That’s excellent advice, Karvain, and I like how you applied the idea beyond computing. We all have proprietary relationships that endanger us if we try to change them or hoard their emotional pinings.