I've been following this discussion and I have a lengthy comment.
Let me begin by quoting Robert Heinlein:
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid
excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide
lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young,
the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these
formalities as 'empty,' 'meaningless,' or 'dishonest,' and scorn
to use them. No matter how pure their motives, they thereby
throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best."
I have heard myriad arguments advanced for abandoning or modifying email
etiquette over the past ten, twenty, thirty years. None of them have
ever been accompanied by a convincing rationale that demonstrates why
the proposed changes are substantive improvements that quantitatively
and qualitatively improve the use of email as a communications medium.
Nearly all of them have been proposed by people of limited and brief
experience, people without substantial experience in large and diverse
environments, people who do not understand how email actually works,
people who do not grasp the scalability issues involved, people who have
never read the RFCs, people who have never used more than one email client
or operating system, people who make the serious mistake of reading their
email with a web browser, people who simply want to do what they want
to do because their world view is myopic and selfish, people who think
email should be instant messaging, people who naively think the web is
the most important part of the Internet, people who do not understand
that not everyone enjoys the high-speed/low-cost connectivity that they
do, people who use horribly broken and/or non-standards-compliant email
clients, people who think email should be used for large file transfer,
people who don't send/receive large volumes of messages, people who
don't participate in mailing lists, people who don't understand the
difference (and similarities) between Usenet and email, people who have
never bothered to learn and understand proper email etiquette, or all
of the above.
We of course see these same people top-posting, full-quoting, sending
email marked up with HTML, failing to wrap their lines, carelessly sending
mailing list followups both on-list and off-list, and engaging in similar
rude, lazy, impolite, stupid and completely unprofessional behavior.
What we do not see are any of them advancing cogent, carefully-made
arguments for change. That is NOT to say such arguments don't exist:
perhaps they do. Perhaps there are changes that *should* be made.
But 100% of the onus for demonstrating that in a compelling fashion,
including a full explanation of how such changes will make email better
AND a careful examination of the drawbacks to such proposed changes,
rests with those advocating for change. Simply put, they must prove it
or admit that they cannot make the case.
I'm a huge fan of change. But I'm NOT a fan of gratuitous, ill-considered
change in order to accomodate those individuals who want it merely
because they're selfish and/or inexperienced and/or ignorant.
In this particular case, for instance, those advocating a change from
the useful courtesy of sane line-wrap MUST provide a full justification
for that. They must show how it's an improvement, not merely something
that *should* be done because it *can* be done. They must fully enumerate
all of the consequences of such a change, taking into consideration for
example the extant universe of email clients, the command-line tools used
to process email (after all: anyone who doesn't work at the command line
can hardly claim to be knowledgeable or professional -- at best, they
are an amateur, a dilettante, a newbie), the pre- and post-processing
performed by MUAs, MTAs, MDAs, etc. -- and more.
This will take considerable thought, research and time. It's not a
simple issue. It'd be convenient if it were...but it's not.
Some people will decline to do that, which is fine. But such a refusal
is of course a full public admission that they've failed to make the
case and thus that even they, themselves, admit that their suggestion
has absolutely no merit whatsoever.
Far more briefly: prove it.
---rsk
