[sylpheed:37136] Re: Quoting Styles

[Anton Shepelev]

Steve O'Hara-Smith to Anton Shepelev:

> > I don't think anybody
> > ever interpreted bottom-posting as replying under one
> > huge quotation of the entire previous message (as I did
> > here :-)
> 
> 	You've never seen a to hundred line nested quote
> with a one line response at the bottom ? I've seen far
> too many.

Interleaving applies only to the last (outer) message in
the quotation. If it is atomic, the reply goes at the
bottom. It is but a special case of interleaving.

> 	Top posting with complete quoting does have a
> place, it's just not mailing lists or USENET. That style
> is most suited for internal threads in a company where at
> any time someone may be dragged into the conversation and
> receive an email with a couple of months of discussion
> hanging off "What do you think we should do?".

Yeah, from time to time I find myself dragged into exactly
this sort of conversation at work, and I hate the format,
especially because of the enormous noise-to-signal ratio,
what with headers and signatures occupying more vertical
space that actual content. Oh, those bloated corporate
signatures!

> Circulation is limited and variable so the only place to
> put the context is in the message. It's no fun reading
> all that context upside down, but it beats not having the
> full context when you're put on the spot.

I practice several solutions to this problem:

1. Remove irrelevant parts of the discussion dealing with
   synchronisation, organisation, &c. Ususally, three to
   five relatively recent e-mail are one needs to read in to
   peruse in order entirely to understand the problem. The
   remainder is ping-pong, clarification of various
   misunderstandings, and potentiall lengthy
   inverstication, of which the new member need only know
   the result, e.g. after two weeks of correspondence the
   performance bottleneck was finally nailed down to a
   specific component, and a reproduction scenario found.

2. Use Groff with my macros to reformat the the condensate
   into a linear play-style format, which instead of
   nesting prepeds each message with the name of the poster.

3. Sometimes I will simply recap the context in a couple of
   coherent paragraphs.

4. In order to invite a new person into a conversation, can
   attach the entire thread to the invitation e-mail, which
   Sylpheed can do via the "Forward as Attachment" menu.

Those who throw fifty screens of noisy text into your face
and ask "What do you think we should do with this" are at
best impolite through laziness. Others will include
undeclared attachmets, images, or reply with an empty text
and an image without so much as writing: "You can see the
actual seetings in the attached screenshot." Oh, some also
save screeshots in JPEG instead of PNG, or even use MS Word
as a universal screenshot container. And these peple
consider themselves IT specialists! My commandment
for all text communication is:

   Respect thy correspondent.

   Corollary:

   Thou shalt not encode textual information as images
   but always send it as actual text in the body of the
   article.

Sometimes this may require retyping of a short message from
screen or using a built-in export function instead of
hitting PrintScreen by way of reflex. But in my corporate
enviroment the most people will condenscend to doing is
mark the relevant part of a full-screen image with a crude
red frame. They will even crop the image to the fragment of
interest. What shameful laziness!

Pardon my rant, if you didn't enjoy it :-)