On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 02:52:41PM -0500, Kent West wrote:
> At the risk of starting yet another war about top-posting, I just came
> across this (year-old) blog by what appears to be the guy who wrote
> (with a couple of others) the IMAP support in Microsoft's Entourage
> ("Outlook for the Mac") product.
I wonder if I may be so bold as to suggest the final word
about top- or bottom-posting. Here it is:
Your email program should be smart enough to customize to
your preference.
Email messages should look like so:
<message>
<messageWereReplyingTo>
This is some stuff that a guy wrote
</messageWereReplyingTo>
<whatWeSayInResponse>
I disagree vehemently with whatever you said
</whatWeSayInResponse>
</message>
Then if I want to display the response on top, I can; if I
want to display the original message on top, I can do that
too.
Programs can hack their way to this now, by assuming that
any line starting with N '>'s is an N-levels-deep message
earlier in the thread. The XML approach could lead to all
sorts of improvements -- e.g., we could have
<messageWereReplyingTo>
<messageID id="[blahblahblah]@TheloniousMonk.laniels.org" />
<body>
This is some stuff that a guy wrote
</body>
</messageWereReplyingTo>
Since the messageID is embedded in the part that we're
replying to, smart clients would allow us to click on the
quoted part and jump back to the original message to read
the full context. It would make email threading a lot more
useful.
The whole top- versus bottom-posting debate is pretty bush
league, I think. We should have stopped *needing* to talk
about it around 1995.
--
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature