On Tue, 2003-03-18 at 13:07, Hans Fugal wrote: > > Top posting and not trimming are almost the same thing, in my opinion. > > One feeds off the other. Top posting is slightly more evil, though, > > because it puts the comment before the context. > And what's wrong with that? The whole argument for all this cut&paste > mumbo-jumbo is that we don't need the whole message to communicate > effectively. Directly responding to context (like I'm doing here) is > common practice but I think many would agree that it is a product of > laziness (together with habit because for some technical things it is > clearly the right way).
I'm not certain that it is laziness. A normal email will have multiple sub-threads and placing your reply right next to the appropriate context makes it obvious which specific thought you're replying to. Take the above paragraph, for example. I could have written it to stand on it's own, but I would have had to supply so much context I might as well quote you directly and get it exactly right. > When I'm not in a hurry or lazy, I try to remove all quotations and let > my email stand on its own. Now if I could be in less of a hurry and less > lazy more often... In a perfect world, that might be appropriate. In a perfect world I would have also changed the subject line. But I suspect that trying too hard to make messages stand alone on their own would make it look more like a bunch of people talking at each other. -- Stuart Jansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> #define FALSE 0 /* This is the naked Truth */ #define TRUE 1 /* and this is the Light */ -- mailto.c ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
