Peter Lairo wrote:
> Neil Durant wrote:
>
>> Peter Lairo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>>
>>>>> This should work no matter where the sig block is placed. That's
>>>>> just a
>>>>> hacked solution. Better would be a dropdown selection where you can
>>>>> choose from various signatures (e.g., home/work, Text/HTML).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, but again, that's the point - it *does* work no matter where
>>>> you .sig currently is. And that drop-down is already there - the
>>>> from thing I was talking about above.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Great, so the sig shoud be able to go directly below my text (and not
>>> way down below the quoted text).
>>
>>
>>
>> One thing people are missing is that the signature separator ("-- ")
>> that is supposed to come before the signature is used to tell
>> mail/news clients that "everything after this should not be quoted in
>> replies". Good mail/news software should implement this.
>>
>> Why can't people just go and read the RFCs ?
>>
>
> Then the RFC is bad. Software should work the way the user wants it to
> work (within reason, of course). If a mail client needs to know where a
> sig is, then why not define it as:
>
> -- = sig beginning
>
> ++ = sig end
>
> That way the sig could be anywhere. Simple, elegant, make everybody happy.
Except that this format is only defined in a newsgroup message (as
opposed to a RFC) and that no other reader on earth supports it. I
actually think you would be happier requesting some sort of text pasting
feature in mozilla. Then you could bind text (like your signature) to a
key and smack the key when you are done top-replying to a message. You
only lose one keystroke, we get one somewhat useful new feature in
Mozilla, and the 'bottom-signatures-only-rearguard' are mostly happy.
Now if I lived in an alternate universe....
...the real issue is that the signature and the body of the message
are two distinct pieces of information. The '--' is only a hack to
delimit this information for quoting. It has always made me wonder why
a signature was not included as a header like 'Signature: blah'. Then
common mailers could display it at the bottom as text (like now), or
display it on request (I rarely want to see anyones signature; up to 3
more lines to scroll through), or display it in a seperate pane. I
suspect it involves having to embedd newlines somehow. Oh well thats
how it rolls I guess.
-Tom
PS - For simple request/reply business emails, especially ones that take
weeks to respond to I like to have my entire original message included
in the reply. However, for all other communication I want inlined and
trimmed responses. Different strokes I guess. The internet is not so
much a democracy as an anarchy.
