On 21 Sep 2010, at 09:44, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
On Sep 20, 2010, at 7:20 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
One of the problems I have seen emerge on many IETF mailing lists is the
habit of fisking.
Please clarify what you mean by fisking.
By fisking I mean responding to a post line by line *while reading it for
the first time*.
Thanks. And why is this a bad thing, in your view?
[Snip the rest of this brilliant and audacious take.]
You, sir, are owed a beer. And I am owed a new keyboard, because the coffee I
was drinking is suddenly and mysteriously absent from both my cup and my
stomach ...
In all seriousness, forcing any particular approach is the real issue. I
can't imagine how it would be accomplished. What I'd really like to force
people to do is be more thoughtful and restrained; if they did that, it
wouldn't much matter what approach they took to replies. -- Nathaniel
+1. I do generally prefer an in-line style, and that because I wish to give
full attention to the post and leave no chance of ambiguity - but I accept the
utility of top-posting, on very, very rare occasions. In particular,
high-volume blindness-only lists tend to prefer top-posting heavily because the
readers can get quickly to the answers using linear top-down reading by speech
synthesis. (No doubt it is not a coincidence that I am on very few such lists.)
PS for the humor impaired -- only my last paragraph was intended to be
serious. --
Oh, and now you've gone and ruined it. :-)
Cheers,
Sabahattin
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