On Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:09:08 -0400 John C Klensin wrote:
--On Thursday, September 23, 2010 10:43 -0700 Randy Dunlap
<rdunlap(_at_)xenotime(_dot_)net> wrote:
...
the same people also complain when I trim.
So its a combination of pathological behaviours, UI, and
dominance behaviour
That should just be a function of where the UI software
positions the cursor, shouldn't it?
Well, it is a bit more than that. If one had a UI that combines:
-- Small screen with tricky selection and scrolling
-- Insertion of prior messages in the reply with a
"---original message--" line above them, rather than
quoting. Note that, when this is done, the cursor
inevitably ends up above the message.
I don't think that the cursor has to end up there. That's the MUA
and it could control where the cursor ends up.
-- No mechanism for selecting which text is to be quoted
as part of the "reply" command (or button, or whatever)
or even any two of those, then one is quite likely to see
top-posting -- almost anything else is just too time-consuming.
[snip]
In (slight) defense of top-posting (which I definitely choose to
do sometimes), if one is replying very briefly and in summary to
a long and complex message, it is often more efficient for both
the writer and the reader. One should clearly also trim the
long message, but, if people get in a hurry and forget ... well,
Forget? oh, you are just being too nice. ;)
I would hope that we will never again see a time in which the
bandwidth or disk space requirements for a few extra paragraphs
are sufficiently expensive to be more important than people's
time.
Yes, I agree, it's about people's time.
FWIW, the thing that really irritates me is having someone
Ack that.
One thing that bothers me is when people do mixed-line posting
but end their reply say, < 50% thru the message, but then they
don't delete the rest of the message, so the reader has to scan
the rest of the message to see if there are more comments.
This saves time for the (one) sender and wastes time for N readers.
---
~Randy
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