frank gaude' wrote: > All this is good, but I for one think more tolerance for variety is in > order. Diversity is the order of the day, especially when it comes to > developing free software. The fewer rules the better.
The biggest problem with "rules" is that they are certain to be broken, mostly unintentionally. Top-posting can work, but it's certainly rude to top-post a response in summation of a long, complicated post. One's first reaction is "huh?", after which you have to figure out what part(s) the person was responding to, if you feel up to taking the time. Bottom-posting can be bad for the same reason -- the highest intelligibility comes from sticking your responses just below the individual parts that they respond to, while deleting the unnecessary and distracting parts. It would seem that where excessive quoting is especially annoying is in longer threads, where many serial posts accumulate in a big blob -- a snowball effect. If we do see some rules (ugh!) or recommendations (ah, better) develop, perhaps a subrecommendation might be the request to try not to reply to an email if your only goal is to remind the poster of the style recommendations. Greg
