2013/12/17 Frank Shearar <frank.shea...@gmail.com> This battle was lost a decade ago, I'm afraid. >
This wasn´t even a battle until someone decided that top-posting was an amazingly good thing. Thanks to that, we now have posts/mails that sometimes don´t contain even a full sentence of original content, and are followed by loads of quoted text, with signatures, headers, images... you name it. I stop reading some threads because of the excessive amount of irrelevant quoted text, and the inverted order of "response to something" followed by "something that prompted the response. That, if there is a quote at all... Back in the day (I am talking about BBSs, Fidonet and related networks, dating back to the 80s), people took pride in having a very low content to quote ratio, but we were also very careful to quote everything needed to make sense of the response. No more, no less. The early days of Internet email weren´t as bad, either. I came to the conclusion, some years ago, that I will continue to strive to quote properly, and the rest of the world is free to do whatever they want. And I am then free to just ignore messages or threads that are too much trouble for me to follow. Cheers, Sergi
