Hi rhonda, On 6 Aug 2004 at 10:42, rhonda clark spoke, thus:
> I don't mean to complain, but what takes time for me is to reread what a > person has already written. Could this be placed at the bottom, and the > new stuff be at the beginning? Grin! Top posting is bad. Here's an example: Q: Oh! Now it makes sense to me. Okay! No more top-posting for me! A: > It's annoying because it reverses the normal > order of conversation. In fact, many people > ignore top-posted messages. Q: > > What's so wrong with that? A: > > > That's posting your response before > > > the message you're quoting. Q: > > > > People keep bugging me about > > > > "top-posting." What does that mean? Read that in reverse to understand that, as you are expecting others to do for your mail, and perhaps you'll see why I am trying hard to encourage people to write their email conservatively and in a clear format that everyone appreciates and understands. You are asking people to read the original text, usually substantially overquoted and separated from your original post by much intervening rubbish from Microsoft email programs with details of the original sender and beneath your possibly short response, to get the slightest context of what you are replying to, causing excessive cursor movement which is excrutiatingly annoying and makes me less inclined to interject into the dialog, or at least to be complete in my response and address each of your questions. At the absolute worst, in extreme cases of entire message digests being quoted, I will often zap the message right away, deciding that the person, whether well-meaning or not, consider their words infinitely more representative than anyone elses'. If you want to go the whole hog, and I encourage you and everyone else here to do so also, please read this: http://www.river.com/users/share/etiquette/ (simple points that makes your time spent with email users and newsgroups of greatest value, and which encourages clear communication) About the only objection to proper netiquette for blindness-related lists, apart from actually wanting to bother to practice real netiquette, seems to be the need to reach the reply quickly. I suppose searching for the reply is a chore, but it is less of one than replying to the message clearly, if that is your intention, with a top-posted message. I don't have a brilliant short-term memory and it isn't enough to keep looking for things in the original message I haven't yet noted on. Also, I happen to know that Window-Eyes has the ability to skip quoted text - if you have similar features in your screen reader, use them! Remember, the screen reader is there to help you, not to cause you to lower standards of usability for blindness' sake. I suppose this leads to two more suggestions for the BrailleNote: 1. Permit customisable header line to appear at the top of quoted text when you hit reply button. This is another thing that stops me from using the email program to any real extent. For instance, see the reply header at the top of the message I am replying to. You see how the reference is clearly made to the original message with author and date and time, rather than me having to manually strip out the headers, and then insert various pieces of information from those headers at the top of my reply, as I presently have to do with the BrailleNote. 2. Allow the skipping of quoted lines (those beginning with a number of characters, such as >, }, | and a number of others), so that people can jump straight to the first line of non-quoted text. Cheers, Sabahattin -- Thought for the day: Intuition (n): an uncanny sixth sense which tells people that they are right, whether they are or not. Sabahattin Gucukoglu Phone: +44 20 7,502-1615 Mobile: +44 7986 053399 http://www.sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/ Email/MSN: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
