On 9/20/21 15:04, Elsie Hupp wrote:
> As far as I know RFC 1855 is not part of any accepted email
> specification—i.e. the ones actually used by the more popular email
> clients—and several of the behaviors encouraged in it lead to
> undefined behavior on adaptive devices that did not exist in 1995,
> such as smartphones.
> 
> Intentionally using formatting that breaks on the vast majority of
> computing devices in use is not “good etiquette”; this behavior is
> pedantic, condescending, and passive-aggressive, all attributes that
> directly violate the Freedesktop Community Standards, which are a
> much more important document than your dusty cultural artifact:


The fact that smartphone applications are ill designed is not really an
indictment on any particular behavior. They also are lead contenders in
behavior such as:

- adding advertisements for the app you used into your signature

- top quoting the entire email thread, recursively

Anyway.

Your school of thought is in conflict with another school of thought,
both schools of thought have wide support in society, and for someone
who is so upset at the thought of people acting "pedantic, condescending
and passive-aggressive" I find it intriguing that you insult people
right back by calling an *extremely* common convention in technical
mailing lists, a "dusty cultural artifact" and suggesting that it is
malicious behavior.

For the record, my cramped smartphone computing device has no problem
rendering Peter's excellently well-formatted quotes, but yours are, to
me, unreadable.

On the other hand, your non-quote content is *mildly* more readable than
Peter's hard line wrapping, but not by very much -- both are relatively
quite readable.

The real issue that basically destroys my ability to parse your replies
is the fact that it's essentially impossible to visually distinguish
between quotes and original content. The quotes are just a paragraph
beginning with a ">" on the first (reflowed) line only.

My desktop client converts both of them to indented blockquotes... but
perhaps Google / Gmail doesn't have enough funds to pay for developers
as talented as the ones Thunderbird has? I genuinely have no idea, this
has always been a real puzzler to me.


> I’m CCing the conduct committee as a way of *gently encouraging you*
> to approach this forum in a modicum of good faith.
> 
> Note: this is all good-faith, constructive criticism of your
> behavior, not your character. As such I’m sure it should be no great
> difficulty for you to take it to heart.


I am sure we are all delighted to know that disagreeing over mailing
list etiquette "with intent to make smartphones do worse rendering of
the messages" is the point at which you believe it is necessary to
summon the code of conduct committee in order to report
passive-aggressive condescension.


-- 
Eli Schwartz
Arch Linux Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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