On Mon, 2016-05-16 at 20:58 +0100, Owen Smith wrote: > > 25 years ago you always replied to emails by adding your text to the > bottom, or replying inline in the quotes, and email clients expected > it to be done that way. I'm not entirely sure when this changed, but > I get the feeling Microsoft had a lot to do with it.
It didn't "change" per se. It is still good practice to carefully trim your citations to cite *precisely* what you need to for context and no more, and to place specific responses immediately below those citations. Yes, I'm aware that there are a number of mail clients, especially on mobile devices, which make that hard. But I read a lot of email, and it is generally the case that the top-posted ones are much less coherent than the "properly" composed ones. There might be many reasons for that; both causation and correlation. One is probably that you're no longer *reading* the message to which you're replying, as you compose your reply. So you miss things. I often misread messages at first, and realise my mistake as I'm actually *composing* a response. I tend to see it as I re-read the citation I'm about to respond to... which wouldn't happen if I were top-posting. I also see a number of top-posted messages where the sender obviously hasn't quite understood what they're responding to — where responding "properly" may well have helped, as it does me. There's also comprehension for the recipient. I've also seen a lot of top-posted messages with a one-line response or question where it's not entirely clear *what* that one line is responding to, in the whole of the mail that's blindly cited below. With correctly formatted replies, it's easy to cite one line, and put your own one-line response immediately below it. And even where the meaning *can* be discerned, I often find myself jumping back and forth in a top-posted message, trying to match each part of the response to the misplaced citation which *should* have been right next to it. It's a horrible waste of time, and makes reading such messages extremely inefficient. And generally, there is just a lack of precision which cannot be otherwise explained. This is the 'correlation' part. Perhaps it's just because grumpy pedants like to stick to the "old ways", and grumpy pedants are also quite keen on expressing themselves clearly and using the language correctly; I don't know. But a top-posted message is just much more likely to be one of those "wtf were they smoking and what do they think those words even mean" experiences. In a world where I see a *lot* of email on a *lot* of mailing lists, and I need to pick and choose which ones I'm even going to bother reading (and potentially replying to someone who needs help), I have learned that HTML and top-posted messages are generally much less coherent and interesting than properly formed responses. The problem reports therein are much less likely to actually include the information I need to help, and the problem is much *more* likely to exist between keyboard and chair, and not be something that actually needs *fixing*. It also takes (a tiny amount of) extra effort to do things properly, so top-posting can also be perceived as lazy. If I ever top-post, it's almost certainly because I *am* lazy. I'm lying on my arse using my phone or tablet, and can't *even* be bothered to switch to webmail to reply properly. (It usually happens off-list.) For all these reasons, if you post HTML, and if you top-post, then you are just less likely to get technical assistance because certain people (the grumpy pedants who are often most likely to be able to help) are less interested in what you have to say. But sure, this list can stay (I was just checking) and we can continue to have this conversation repeatedly... :) (How do you survive in Cambridge without NNTP and thus without cam.misc though!) -- dwmw2
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
_______________________________________________ get_iplayer mailing list get_iplayer@lists.infradead.org http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/get_iplayer
