Ken Irving wrote: > On Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 10:57:25PM -0500, Kevin Mark wrote: >> Hi folks, >> with the continual talk of the bad etiquitte of top posts, I was >> thinking if anyone has ever developed a way to fix the problem. >> ----------- >> HEADER >> BLANK_LINE >> TOP_POST >> BLANK_LINE >> MESSAGE >> SIG >> ----------- >> into >> ----------- >> HEADER >> BLANK_LINE >> MESSAGE >> BLANK_LINE >> TOP_POST >> SIG >> ------ >> would it be possible to 'classify' posts and fix them? >> (top post,interspersed post,bottom post) >> if possible, would there be a down-side? >> anyone with hair-brainded ideas welcome :-) > > Email in all its forms is structured only by casual convention, > outside of headers and multipart sections, and I can't imagine doing > this sort of automated "correcting" of posts.
Well, at least moving it from a top-post to a bottom-post makes it easier to recover when it comes time to followup to a top-posted followup. > Try doing it manually, a useful exercise before automating anything, and I > suspect you'll see many difficulties due to all sorts of things, like > missing whitespace, hare-brained quoting schemes, etc. I'm amazed how well Gnus does in fixing it anyway, despite that, though. > If you could convince everyone to use the same quoting and other > conventions, then maybe it could work, but in that case why not just > continue and also convince them to not top-post in the first place. I tend to be of the opinion that this is a social problem, and thus cannot be solved through technological means. To that end, I have a page up that everyone here is welcome to constructively edit at http://wiki.ursine.ca/Best_Online_Quoting_Practices that I point people to. Obviously, I don't care one way or another if people also point people to it; if I cared, it wouldn't be publicly available to begin with. :o) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
