By 'hjistoric' ( a light joke) I meant how letters are/were stored.... --- On Mon, 18/4/11, R. Mattes <r...@mh-freiburg.de> wrote:
From: R. Mattes <r...@mh-freiburg.de> Subject: [VIHUELA] Re: list - protocol To: "Monica Hall" <mjlh...@tiscali.co.uk>, "Martyn Hodgson" <hodgsonmar...@yahoo.co.uk> Cc: "Vihuelalist" <vihuela@cs.dartmouth.edu> Date: Monday, 18 April, 2011, 19:06 On Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:42:10 +0100, Monica Hall forwarded > From: [1]Martyn Hodgson > > As said, the reply at the top is usual (and historic!) practice. But > it's also always a good idea to cut and paste in the relevant section > one is queying/amplifying if the original is long This is simply wrong. Sorry, but the "historic" way to quote in Usenet (way before mailing list were common) was either bottom-post or interleaved. I still have my old copy of my university's version of 'Zen and the art of Internet' which teaches the art of interleaved quoting (and a lot of other netiquette ... what happened to the net, sigh!). Top-posting was brought to us by AOL (and later Microsoft) : their meassage clients had no means of qutoing the original and put the cursor above the original message text when replying. Since most of these "new" AOL users had no clue about haow to behave in an online community Top-posting quickly became associated with rude behavior ... Here's an old signature joke from back then: A: Because it reverses the natural order of conversations and makes it confusing as to who posted what. Q: Why is that so annoying? A: Top posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing about mailing lists and Usenet? Monica Hall again: > All I can say is that I agree with this. The problem arises when > several people reply to a message consecutively, some at the top > and some at the bottom. > > The important thing is to keep the discussion in a logical > sequence which everyone can follow. Yes, I totally agree here, top-posting in reply to an interleaved message is plain and simply rude. And, btw. one is supposed to _trim_ the quoted sections, blindly replying with the full message of the original post is rude as well. Why? Because it really blows up the size of my message box. And it's anoying that, when searching for a post, a lot of not so relevant mails show up, only because old quotes still linger at the deep bottom of these messages. Cheers, Ralf Mattes -- R. Mattes - Hochschule fuer Musik Freiburg [1]r...@inm.mh-freiburg.de To get on or off this list see list information at [2]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. http://uk.mc263.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=r...@inm.mh-freiburg.de 2. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html