Abbr when k

Here's the thing, I have no idea why people on the interwebz use abbreviations when writing knitting patterns. I can understand why it's a good idea (or at least a necessary evil) in print work such as a magazine since they have a limited space to include the maximum amount of patterns and every extra bit of text causes more space and that means extra money.

So I can appreciate the necessity of telling someone to k1p1 w/ 12 rep until 4in then k2tog, turn, rep until * in a magazine. I can even accept it in a book. But on the internet? Let's face it, all the text in this blog so far? Probably hasn't even gotten as far as 10MB worth of storage space. Plus this blog, like so many others is hosted for free. I don't pay a damn penny to do this. Even if I did pay for the space, the effect of writing "knit 2 together" instead of "k2tog" or "k1p1" instead of "work in a 1 by 1 rib" is negligible.

Trust me, I've hosted websites before. You could do an almost infinite amount of text before you really started to run out of anything. It's the images that will screw you over and most blogs aren't shy about them (I'll be hosting images as soon as I either find the camera that has batteries or buy batteries for the camera that does not have them). So why do we persist in using the insane abbreviations in a limitless medium? I can't figure it out. Is it just the force of habit? Is it that we see patterns written that way in magazines and other print sources and assume that's how we're supposed to see them elsewhere?

I do not have the answers necessary for those questions, but I am going to make a conscious effort from now on to write in a legible fashion when posting patterns. For one thing, I have to because I think I knit backwards as a result of my left handedness, so when I k you should p and so on and so forth. It's much easier to say "cable on every 6th row and bobble on every 12th" as opposed to trying to figure out what I'm doing and what you should be doing to replicate it.