Re: Gmail and quotes

[David Kastrup]

Helge Kruse <address@hidden> writes:

>> This interface "improvement" also effectively enforces top-posting: it takes
>> extra effort to post replies in the middle of quotes (like a conversation)
>> and most people don't care.
>
> I am in the "e-mail world" for some decades. It was always a good
> style to write the answer on top of all other text and to not delete
> anything that has written before.

In a mailing list?  No.  Never.  Absolutely not.  Please look up any
kind of "netiquette" you can find on the net.

The _only_ situation where top-posting makes _any_ kind of sense is when
communicating with the likes of technical support.

> This makes it easy to save one late copy of the e-mail conversation
> and more important to invite more people to the conversation by
> extending the CC list.

If you quote _properly_, namely by _only_ leaving the material _in_
_place_ that is _relevant_ for the context of the _current_ discussion,
inviting anybody in is possible at any point of time.

Yes, it is bad style to post with crucial context missing.  But no, not
every part of a threads history is crucial context.  Not even of the
last mail.

> The Gmail interface support this usable behavior of the user with this
> improvement.

Ahhahhahahahhahahahahahahahah!!!  It is obvious to anybody with a brain
that storing and sending the same message content _again_ for every
single mail is ludicrous and leads to quadratic network and storage
capacity requirements, only limited by today's people's inability to
lead an extended conversation.  When I write a book, I don't feel
compelled to append all previous chapters in reverse order at the end of
each chapter.

> Mailing lists use the e-mail transport mechanism to build a community.
> Here you have invited everybody who has subscribed to the list.

Cc is also possible when using a mailing list, and a number of LilyPond
mailing lists are open for non-subscribers as well.  So that's not an
absolute criterion.

> We just use the medium to have something like a forum without using a
> dedicated tool. The pros and cons of e.g. Stackoverflow have been
> discussed before. The technical mean what would fit best would have
> been the usenet, but that's dead.

I am actually reading this list via nntp (news.gmane.org).

> Finally we use e-mail in a way different from the mainstream.

No, we don't.  None of my friends top-posts.

> So we will have to live with improvements that doesn't fit with our
> requirements.

An "improvement" that _does_ _not_ _scale_ is no improvement.

-- 
David Kastrup