On 30 Mar 99, at 9:07, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
> I am wondering if anyone has written up a document that I can refer users
> to about particular policies, The policies in quesiton are
>
> (1) Quoting entire message being replied to
> (2) Doing (1) by sticking the quoted message at the end
> (3) Posting multipart/alternative messages.
(1) and (2) are dealt with in RFC 1855, which amidst a wealth of good
advice and general good sense says:
3.1.1 General Guidelines for mailing lists and NetNews
- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just
enough text of the original to give a context. This will make
sure readers understand when they start to read your response.
Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the
postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a
response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context
helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!
[Begin rant]
This "modern style", which I find constantly counterproductive and
irritating, of having the messasge *begin* with the reply, and then have
a copy of the -entirety- of the original message seems to be a side
effect of the merging of the email world with the business world [you can
guess whose clients started doing this].
In the business world in the "old days" (probably still in places where
the primary means of information-moving-around is on paper), when there
was an onoing discussion/account/whatever folks would write memos and
send and recieve letters and faxes and you didn't 'cite' the original (in
a medium that doesn't really admit of 'cut and paste' or the auto-copy
machinery of the standard reply, you learned to write more carefully and
(as you probably learned in school but have forgotten) used techniques
like "embed the question implicitly in the reply" and such...)
What you did was had an actual physical folder and you put your memo to
add to the thread on the top of the pile of previous documents, reports,
receipts, court orders, etc, etc, and it went into the cabinet until
something else happened --- when a new bit of correspondence came in
[e.g., by fax or USmail or a returned phone call or whatever], you'd just
open the folder, put the new stuff on top of the pile [making the pile be
reverse-chronological order], and yes indeed, if someone new joined the
project or picked up the account, they would have to read the pile of
paper bottom-to-top, riffling through].
The obnoxious reply-style is the adaptation of that to the electronic
medium. The fact that it makes no sense, is counterproductive, makes it
hard/impossible to follow a discussion doesn't matter, of course [the
'riffling' is very hard [at least for me] electronically: it is one thing
to lift up a sheet of paper to see the correspondence right below it,
quite another [IMO] to page-down-page-down-page-down to sift through the
headers and irrelevancia to find the original inquiry, then page-up-page-
up-...etc.. to get back to the reply (and if something wasn't clear, then
it is page-down-... and then back up, all over again to check the
referenced note). AND: unlike paper originals, electronic originals can
live on file servers in shared mail folders, so if you properly
"excerpted" and included quotes from a prior message and someone needed
to see the whole thing, they could easily just fetch a copy. Not to
mention that the emails get more and more unwiedly, as each carries along
EVERY previous message in the thread...
Of course, it is easy on the author: they've *just* read the previous
message, it is fresh in their mind, and so they can just dash off the
reply "That's sounds fine, let me know when it is ready"... the fact
that this makes it ugly for the *reader* [*what* sounds fine? Am I doing
it or was I just cc'ed and is someone else? What's going on???] isn't an
issue: you all know that the first rule of good writing is "What's
easiest for the author is most important; damn the readers".
[yes, this is a hotbutton issue for me... could you tell?? :o)]
/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pearisburg, VA
--> Too many people, too few sheep <--
