Jess Lee

Posted on Feb 5, 2019

What does FOUC stand for?

#todayisearched #todayilearned

I saw the below screen on my phone earlier and shared it with the team. It went away on refresh and I couldn't reproduce it, but wanted to check that no one else was seeing it.

@maestromac responded with, "looks like FOUC."

I had no idea what that meant but on a quick search, realized that it stands for "Flash of Unstyled Content."

Straight forward enough, but what an acronym! How is it even pronounced?!

Top comments (19)

Ryan Smith • Feb 5 '19 • Edited

I feel that acronyms often have a tendency to hurt communication instead of helping. If it is not widely used, why create or perpetuate the use of acronym? I have seen cases where acronyms are the same or more syllables than the original phrase, why??

An acronym here and there might seem fine if it helps simplify communication (no one wants to say "HyperText Markup Language" all the time), but in workplaces it tends to build up over the years with company-specific lingo. Bringing in new developers on a project becomes that much more difficult because of all the terms they need to ask about or be ignorant to if they stay quiet about it. Acronyms do not only permeate spoken language, but they end up in the codebase. Not only does the new person have difficult challenges in meetings when these are used, but also when they are developing.

PBTAYAU (please be thoughtful about your acronym usage).

Jess Lee • Feb 5 '19

Couldn't agree more!!

Ben Halpern • Feb 6 '19

Reminds me of this memo Elon Musk sent out:

Acronyms Seriously Suck

There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.

That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action - I have given enough warning over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past.

For example, there should be not "HTS" [horizontal test stand] or "VTS" [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A "stand" at our test site is obviously a test stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with "Tripod", which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name!

The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, e.g. MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.

Ryan Smith • Feb 6 '19

That is awesome, I love his hidden joke in the subject line. 😂 I wouldn't expect Elon to get caught up in things like this, but it is good to know that big tech entrepreneurs encounter similar problems.

Ben Halpern • Feb 5 '19 • Edited

Jess you've been quietly petitioning for #todayigoogled and I agree. It's a great way to summarize any search you did in the most digestible way for the next person who might be Googling it.

#todayigoogled

Summarize your search findings so someone else can learn from your journey.

Ben Halpern • Feb 5 '19

It's similar to #todayilearned but I really do see a bit of a differentiation around context and helpfulness.

But #todayilearned is another useful tag we could lean in to.

#todayilearned

Summarize a concept that is new to you.

Jason C. McDonald • Feb 5 '19

I agree with Jess about the whole "Google" thing. There are several search engines, DuckDuckGo being a huge one (the only one I use). With privacy being a big thing right now, we really don't want to reinforce Google's (illusion of) ubiquity.

How about #todayisearched, and just ALIAS #todayigoogled to that?

Jess Lee • Feb 5 '19

Yeah, good call. I'll update that.

Jess Lee • Feb 5 '19

OH yeah. I forgot all about that one. I don't love #todayigoogled bc....I wish I was duckduckgo'in instead! I'm going to throw #TIL on as well.

Joe Hobot • Feb 5 '19 • Edited

#TIG vs #TIL

Paweł Kowalski • Nov 15 '19

and its equivalent for privacy concerned - todayiducked ;)

Antonio Radovcic • Feb 6 '19

Ah yes, the seconds until JS fixes what CSS couldn't do.

I'd say like "fouck", like "doubt" or "foul".

Besides I really like FOUC and FOUT (Text) and I'm sad that many websites hide all content until it's all perfectly in place. Unstyled content is still better than no content, and nobody will throw away their phone in disguist of overlapping icons.