> This is to point to the basic etiquette for mailing lists. > > http://linuxfromscratch.org/faq/#netiquette
For the "fun" of it, I just read that section again as it had been a while since I read it myself. I have some thoughts on it all. The part on HTML and top posting reminds me of some recent posts to our lists where people "complained" about HTML messages and top posting. There is being expended a lot of effort by replying to posts to ask people to not top post and trim their posts. The end result is just more spam to the list about things that aren't relevant to any LFS discussions at hand. Trimming posts should be done to ensure emails don't get needlessly long. Yet, ironically, those "please trim" replies just do exactly the opposite. It defeats the purpose and this whole thing is starting to become overly zealous in my opinion. HTML or no HTML. I fully understand the reasons behind no-HTML because I was the one who made it a "rule". I setup the lists to detect HTML tags and simply not let those emails through. There was a good reason for it but consider the timelines involved. More on this rationale in a minute. Wrapping at 72 characters. I'm in violation of our established netiquettes by writing this email. I use Zimbra as my mail server because it checks all the checkboxes including a free ActiveSync solution that works perfectly with modern smart devices (Android and Apple alike). I can't for the life of me figure out how to make it webmail client wrap text at 72 characters. A quick Google search led nowhere and I don't feel like expending that much time and effort on something that might not really be needed anymore. More on this in a minute as well. Top posting is something I fully agree with, in principle, but it's quite hard these days with the proliferation of smart phones. Myself included. Maybe this is caused by Outlook and how it operates and the world just conformed to it over the decades. If I reply to emails from my phone, top posting is the only method that makes sense to do without it becoming a bothersome chore. It's hard enough to write LFS-type emails (ie technical emails that kill auto-correct) without having to worry about this on top of everything else. And I really would hate to be "forced" to try and figure out how to wrap at 72 characters on a small phone screen. It'll just have to wrap the way it is going to. There isn't much control there. So the aforementioned rationale. Truly, the reason for the no-HTML and wrap-at-72-characters were two things I insisted on back in the day when I first started LFS. At the time I primarily used "mutt" for emailing from text consoles and back in those days, HTML rendering in text clients just didn't exist. It was atrocious to try and read HTML emails in its raw format and if things didn't wrap around 80 columns, it was a big issue as well. Nobody likes horizontal scrolling. Notice how I said back in the day? That was ca. 1998. Twenty years ago. Literally in the previous century. Welcome to the 21st century! A lot has changed. Virtually any email client can process HTML today. Smartphones exist now and are widely used. HTML has become the world's default. Programs can wrap text properly by themselves. I would go as far as making this statement: if somebody uses software that is so antiquated it can't deal with today's standard formatting and generally accepted practices, maybe it's time to upgrade to better software, instead of requiring the world at large to downgrade to now-obsolete practices/standards. Maybe that's a little harsh but judging by some of the comments I have seen here on this very list over the last few weeks, I honestly wonder if that isn't what people expect. Counter-arguments will undoubtedly be along the lines of "just because the whole world does something dumb doesn't mean we all have to give in to it". That may be true from a purist point of view but we shouldn't plan that particular flag here. We're working on LFS. Let's pick the battles we can actually win. If you write HTML emails you can actually format lengthier emails to actually be readable with headers and pre-formatted font where it makes sense. Reading a large amount of monotone text isn't particularly pleasant (like this very email itself). I think it's time to re-evaluate some of these old stances and relax on them somewhat. -- Gerard -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
