Karsten and others have already explained the evils of jeopardy-style
quoting, so I won't go into that again. I have some other remarks though.
On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 13:53:24 -0600, John Galt wrote:
> In case nobody told you, this is a mailinglist, not usenet.
I'm well aware that debian-user is primarily a mailing list. I've been on it
since the time user support was just one of the topics on the single Debian
mail "channel". I'm also aware that it is not just accessed as a mailing
list, but also as a usenet group and as a webbased information resource;
contexts in which following threads is often less easy than it is with a
sophisticated MUA. (Not that sophisticated MUAs justify top-posting, as has
been pointed out already)
> To be more precise, this is a reliable method of ensuring that anything
> you reply to has already been read,
It is not. Email is not reliable; nothing forces anyone to read every
message in a thread (think e.g. of subthreads with changed subjects); people
or systems clean up mailboxes (in particular with lists of debian-user's
volume) etc.
> thus you shouldn't need to scroll through the question all of the time to
> get to the answer.
Appropriate quoting among other things entails trimming quoted text to a
right amount of context, which is typically less than a terminal full, so
there is not much scrolling involved.
> Needless to say, the best method is to let the replier define how their
> reply goes,
Grammatically I can parse this sentence, but I'm miffed as to what it is
supposed to mean.
> but you really didn't do that to Hall,
Hall asked what was meant by "use postfix response", and I explained what
Karsten (presumably) meant by that.
> so I feel justified in correcting you.
If feeling justified makes you happy, I'm glad to have contributed to your
happiness. Otherwise, I've seen nothing in your remarks that I consider a
valid correction.
Ray
--
POPULATION EXPLOSION Unique in human experience, an event which happened
yesterday but which everyone swears won't happen until tomorrow.
- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan
