We are often warned against over-generalization, and on mailing lists and web fora you can almost guarantee that any statement about “all” p or “the only” p, whether p is members of some ethnic group, documents in some language, or whatever, will provoke angry responses and obscure counter examples. I’ve been on both sides of this process myself, most recently here.
I just saw a sentence on the www-style mailing list which made me blink:
many authors wouldn’t bother writing web pages if they weren’t finite.
I’d love to meet the authors who would bother writing infinite web pages, though I suspect they might have trouble fitting me into their busy schedule.
The only explanation I can think of is that the author had taken the lesson “don’t overgeneralize” a little bit too much to heart.