On 21 Sep 2010, at 09:44, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote: > On Sep 20, 2010, at 7:20 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > One of the problems I have seen emerge on many IETF mailing lists is the > habit of fisking. > > Please clarify what you mean by fisking. > >> By fisking I mean responding to a post line by line *while reading it for >> the first time*. > > Thanks. And why is this a bad thing, in your view?
[Snip the rest of this brilliant and audacious take.] You, sir, are owed a beer. And I am owed a new keyboard, because the coffee I was drinking is suddenly and mysteriously absent from both my cup and my stomach ... > > In all seriousness, forcing any particular approach is the real issue. I > can't imagine how it would be accomplished. What I'd really like to force > people to do is be more thoughtful and restrained; if they did that, it > wouldn't much matter what approach they took to replies. -- Nathaniel +1. I do generally prefer an in-line style, and that because I wish to give full attention to the post and leave no chance of ambiguity - but I accept the utility of top-posting, on very, very rare occasions. In particular, high-volume blindness-only lists tend to prefer top-posting heavily because the readers can get quickly to the answers using linear top-down reading by speech synthesis. (No doubt it is not a coincidence that I am on very few such lists.) > PS for the humor impaired -- only my last paragraph was intended to be > serious. -- Oh, and now you've gone and ruined it. :-) Cheers, Sabahattin _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
