Re: top post fixer?
Ken Irving wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 10:57:25PM -0500, Kevin Mark wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>> with the continual talk of the bad etiquitte of top posts, I was
>> thinking if anyone has ever developed a way to fix the problem.
>> -----------
>> HEADER
>> BLANK_LINE
>> TOP_POST
>> BLANK_LINE
>> MESSAGE
>> SIG
>> -----------
>> into
>> -----------
>> HEADER
>> BLANK_LINE
>> MESSAGE
>> BLANK_LINE
>> TOP_POST
>> SIG
>> ------
>> would it be possible to 'classify' posts and fix them?
>> (top post,interspersed post,bottom post)
>> if possible, would there be a down-side?
>> anyone with hair-brainded ideas welcome :-)
>
> Email in all its forms is structured only by casual convention,
> outside of headers and multipart sections, and I can't imagine doing
> this sort of automated "correcting" of posts.
Well, at least moving it from a top-post to a bottom-post makes it easier to
recover when it comes time to followup to a top-posted followup.
> Try doing it manually, a useful exercise before automating anything, and I
> suspect you'll see many difficulties due to all sorts of things, like
> missing whitespace, hare-brained quoting schemes, etc.
I'm amazed how well Gnus does in fixing it anyway, despite that, though.
> If you could convince everyone to use the same quoting and other
> conventions, then maybe it could work, but in that case why not just
> continue and also convince them to not top-post in the first place.
I tend to be of the opinion that this is a social problem, and thus cannot
be solved through technological means. To that end, I have a page up that
everyone here is welcome to constructively edit at
http://wiki.ursine.ca/Best_Online_Quoting_Practices that I point people to.
Obviously, I don't care one way or another if people also point people to
it; if I cared, it wouldn't be publicly available to begin with. :o)
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