[mythtv-users] [OT] im so sorry. test.

[Dave Sherohman]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 09:50:14AM -0500, Michael T. Dean wrote:
> OK, how about an example.

Good idea.  And here's another example for things that follow
trivially with infix replies, but become cumbersome with top-posting
(or with pure bottom-posting as well).

> Notice in the proper reply 
> the trimming (especially of useless Hash stuff, signatures, and the 
> previous mailing list footers.  Normally, I would have also trimmed the 
> irrelevant information--the part about not receiving own posts and 
> GMail, but I left it in to show a deeply-threaded reply.

Ah, well...  I guess I can't give you a hard time for not trimming
the irrelevant text, since you had a good reason for leaving it in...

> On 03/13/2006 07:17 AM, Michael Freeman wrote:
> >I kinda agree with Dean....maybe you just didn't put enough space in there,
> >but I read that quoted text twice before noticing your "Like this" in the
> >middle of it.
> >That style just seems harder to read to me.

That's because, as you suggested, whitespace is important for
creating visual separation between quoted text and replies.  It also
underscores the importance of trimming quoted text so there's less of
it for replies to hide in.

> Notice that the cleaned up reply didn't require significant 
> scrolling--even though the information was within/below the quotes.  
> It's only when people are too lazy to trim that scrolling becomes annoying.

Actually, if you had trimmed normally instead of leaving the previous
thread in there, I suspect that most of us wouldn't have to have
scrolled at all.


So, what have I done here?

1)  Trimming the post cut the size of my reply way, way down and
eliminated any need to scroll through pages of quoted text to see a
reply, addressing the complaint raised about bottom-posting.

2)  Use of whitespace separated my comments from those of previous
posters, addressing the complaint raised about infix replies.

3)  By putting my responses immediately after the text they're
replying to, I was able to maintain a clear conversational flow while
addressing multiple, largely unrelated points.  Doing so with either
top- or bottom-posting would lose the context of my responses and
probably require additional text to identify which point(s) I was
addressing and when, but, even then, it would remain less clear.

IMO, #3 is by far the most important of these points and generally
seems to be the primary reason that people prefer infix replies in
any but trivial cases.

-- 
The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the
White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that
we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened.
  - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html)