On someone's personal blog, if you're going to comment, and the person's name and photo is right there, it's about the same as addressing a female in person as "Sir" (or in this case, "dude")
"Dude" works for women. How else are you going to call a female person in her late twenties? "Woman" is way too formal for many settings, "girl" can imply that you think she's not mature, and "gal" is just... no.
If anyone has a better alternative, do tell. I'm not too pleased with "dude" either.
Either be more specific (you, hacker, engineer, etc) or less specific (person, or leave off the pronoun?)? I mean, I don't think any of this is that important, and saying things like "the elevator has a 10 man capacity" is fine, but there is no reason not to try to be accurate when it costs little.
Your choices are: dudette, dudess, or dudine.
Miss.
> used the male pronoun because that is the correct grammatical structure when the gender is unknown.
According to the prestige dialect, yes. Not according to most of the more common dialects of English.
Oh? And what is the correct pronoun in that case?
I certainly never pay the slightest bit of attention to the gender of people I read. Does it make any difference?