littled.net

Argh, I can’t stand it anymore, I have to say something about this. I spend much of my day on Google finding out how to do my job; one of the many benefits of working with open source software I assure you. Luckily for me, there’s plenty of information out there. Unfortunately much of it is at best grammatically challenged and at worst unintelligible. Oh, I know this uncharitable — all that information is being provided for free and without it I’d be lost. Some of the authors might not even have English as their first language — but why do people find it so hard to use “it’s” and “its” correctly?

It’s not hard! Here’s how it works:

• It’s = an abbreviation of it is or it has (e.g. “it’s Sunday”, “it’s been done before”)
• Its = belonging to it (e.g. I need to get my laptop fixed. Its screen is broken)

That’s it. The end. Apostrophes cause endless problems I know, but think of it like this: you don’t write hi’s, her’s, our’s or their’s, it’s perfectly logical. And programmers, think of all those bytes you can save!