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> Well, you youngsters have it wrong. <grin>
Once again, you make assumptions about our age. Don't go there.
> It used to -be- proper etiquette to quote at the top, both for usenet and
> email. The reason: our connections were a lot slower and we could read
> the messages as they streamed by, cancelling a download if we saw enough.
Rubbish. top-quoting is a new thing, bred by the laziness of posters
who are using braindead mail applications such as Outlook Express and the
likes.
I've lived through the "old" days of email, since at least 1980 for
me, and before that, it was called "message bases" back in the BBS world,
and 'mail' on the vax. Offline reading of mail or using usenet was more
common then, and you downloaded the headers, and read selected messages
after retrieval. There was no way to "cancel the download", and certainly
not WHILE reading the incoming message stream.
In fact, proper quoting was and is used to _decrease_ the size of
messages, quoting only the relevant parts to the recipient. If you quote
properly, your message's total size decreases by a considerable amount.
But this isn't about size, we're not on dialup any longer, and we
don't generally have to wait for mail messages to come across. It's about
ettiquette. Top-quoting is annoying, frustrating, and an incredible waste of
space for people who, like myself, sometimes read mail on my Palm handheld.
100 lines of irrelevant quoted material to wade through is frustrating, and
leads me to just tap on delete.
So, I quote you from the FAQ[1]
When replying, should I quote the previous message?
Most certainly. You should always provide some context to your
replies so that people who may not have been following the thread
closely, or who have other things on their minds will easily be able
to determine what you're talking about.
However, when quoting, be very careful to edit the quoted sections
down to the bare minimum of text needed to maintain the context for
your reply. There is very little on a mailing list that is more
annoying than paging through a few pages of quoted text only to read
a few lines at the end. Also be careful that you clearly indicate
what text you're quoting (as opposed to what you're writing), and if
possible, cite the author of the original text.
If your mail program wants to attach the whole message you're
replying to on the end of your replies, please do not let it do this
if you can possibly avoid it. It is a good thing to include excerpts
from previous messages with your replies to maintain a logical flow
of discussion, but it is almost always a bad thing to include the
entire text of a message being replied to, be it at the start or end
of your reply.
> I agree about the HTML, proper quoting, etc. but quote-location is sort of
> like code indentation - minor religions.
Not minor religions, it's about usability. Remove irrelevant
material from your message, respond underneat the material that you retain
which is relevant, and so on. Read my previous emails on the list or in the
archives for good examples, also many others on this list as well.
[1] http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/usenet/ml-etiquette.html
d.
perldoc -qa.j | perl -lpe '($_)=m("(.*)")'
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