begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 11:21:46AM -0700:
[snip]
> Is it just me, or has someone else noticed the following from the
> clueless: My MUA puts "> " in front of quoted material. Sometimes a CL
> response also has "> " in front of the new material they add. I don't
> know if their MUA is stupid or if they see my "> "s and think they're
> supposed to add them by hand ... like someone making a grammatical error
> ("He gave the book to Henry and I") through trying to sound more
> educated.
I don't think that's deliberate[1]. I think it's the tool "being helpful".
Whenever I first set up a GUI mail client, I end up fighting it. I
don't WANT pretty blue lines indicating quoting, thank you -- I can
do just fine with ">" as a prefix. I don't WANT the program tracking
what was originally quoted or not.
I suspect part of the blame for the lack of trimming and interspersed
replies is due to the tools trying to be "smart", and failing. The
user just wants to send a reply, and if the tool makes something a
bit difficult, well, they obviously shouldn't be doing that.
My biggest difficulty with software is when it tries to be smarter
than I am. Because it's so difficult to make code smart, and easy
to make the user dumb, the way to make a program smarter than I am
is to make the interface complicated and helpful to the point where
I'm effectively an idiot.
[1] Not always. At least, I've yet to encounter someone who did such
things deliberately, so far as I can tell.
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