Re: Reading e-mail.

For the benefit of the MUA-impaired, I'll top-post.

First of all, I'll second what Tom said. And add some:

Email has been around for a bit and certain conventions (which normal MUAs
know) have come to be standard practice. Similar conventions exist(ed) on
FIDO and whatnot. If one were to make a new MUA, one should figure out how
to deal with existing conventions, IMHO. Which also means that if you happen
to use an MUA that fails to present normal '>' quoted text or a signature
after a "--" in a reasonable way, I suggest you stop using that MUA and find
a better one that does it right. Or, of course, write your own.

Asking the world to change around broken implementations sounds rather...
"imperfect" to me. For any change, there has to be a good reason why the old
way was broken or why the new way is so much better. And such reason is to
apply to everybody or a vast majority. That is, a mere "green text looks
better in my MUA and I like it" is not a reason to ask for every MUA to do
just that.

I find that skipping quoted text when reading replies is very easy. For me,
it's in different colors (and if it's doubly-quoted text, it'd be in yet
another color). It is, however, very nice to be able to look immediately up
and see what the comment was referring to. Granted, in many of my emails
there are multiple issues being addressed, so keeping the context consistent
is a rather proper thing to do. This is, of course, only due to me having a
rather incapable brain: I need technology to help me remember the details of
conversations if those conversations begin to stretch in time. "Ed is for
those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you
should use Emacs."

As for annoyances in email, I personally find other things much more
annoying: whole paragraphs as single lines, HTML email when there's no need
for formatting. Annoying, but I can compensate for those. At least it aint a
word document. Some things are harder to compensate for: people who can't
spell or form grammatically correct sentences in the language of their
choosing. If the sender doesn't care to express things in an actual
language, why should the recipient bother to read?

I do partially agree with Jan in a sense that if the response is not a
logical continuation of the existing message, it is probably better left as
a top-post. E.g. say somebody sends me a description of their problem, which
I am not going to do anything about, but rather just forward to the right
person. In this case, my (somewhat out-of-band) reply would be a top-post
(something like "Please contact <foo> (CCed on this message) for these
problems")

Vadim.

[I don't know whether broken MUAs can handle In-Reply-To: header right, so
I'll leave most of the original message below]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 10:32:57AM -0800, Tom Holub wrote:
> Jan Pardoe wrote:
> >I, on the other hand, don't use a screen reader and still find
> >bottom-posting annoying and a waste of my time. when I've been
> >reading the whole thread and I know what the person before
> >said, what I want now is to see the reply. It's not helpful
> >to have to wade through the previous message again in order
> >to get at the new information.
>
> Here, I will intersperse, because there are two points which I want to
> respond to separately.
>
> Look at your paragraph; it begins with "I, on the other hand..." What
> other hand? It's not clear at all what you're responding to, because the
> comment you're responding to is below your text, rather than above it as it
> would be in any other reading context. While I enjoyed both the movie
> "Memento" and the backwards Seinfeld episode, I find English text quite a
> bit easier to read when it is presented linearly.
>
> (Also, in this particular case, my message ended with a question about why
> screen readers can't figure out the difference between quoted and
> non-quoted text, which is not what your "I, on the other hand..." is
> responding to).
>
> >When I reply, I edit the message to remove unnecessary
> >previous messages from the bottom. If the message or my
> >reply is complex, I insert my reply points into the message
> >I'm replying to. In most cases (for example, this one) that
> >isn't necessary. I've never seen a case where putting my
> >reply completely below the message I'm replying to served any
> >useful purpose. Which isn't to say it doesn't work for you,
> >just that it's incorrect to imply that anyone who doesn't use
> >a screen reader will prefer bottom-posting.
>
> I acknowledge that some people prefer top-posting, but generally I feel
> that that is due to laziness rather than any real benefit gained by
> top-posting.
>
> In any case, it should be clear that it is easier to change software than
> to alter human behavior. An option to "ignore quoted text" or "read quoted
> text last" should be trivial to add to a screen reader; in fact, if
> interspersed-quoting is a problem for those using screen readers, I'm
> surprised it hasn't been done already.

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