Re: Quoting styles, cont (Was Re: Fonts in GTK)

[John Galt <galt@inconnu.isu.edu>]

Ahhh.  So the brokenness lies in the lack of quotation definers and the
implicit one line open (BTW, pine/pico leaves two, but angle-brackets
things in pretty well).  I just figured that the brokenness was an
artifact of where the cursor gets put, not having dealt with Lookout
(personal reasons, I know of the guy who wrote it and have nothing good to
say about him--if I was stuck in windoze, I'd prolly use a third party
app).  So the top-posting coupled with the microso~1 stuff is really a
no-op, since the non-quotation quotation can be dealt with in the process
of editing, since a bottom poster has to cursor through the old message,
there should be no problem adding in an angle-bracket on every line.
Perhaps in light of arguements like this, where the other side gets
demonized by micros~1 unfairly, there ought to be the Debian equivalent of
Godwin's razor: Since micros~1 is the functional equivalent of Nazis in
Debian, it follows that for uses inside Debian, that Godwin's razor cuts
on mentions of micros~1...

On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, Craig Dickson wrote:

>John Galt wrote:
>> Elm predates any microsoft email product...  Try to quote stuff in elm,
>> the cursor goes to the beginning of the text.
>
>Where the cursor starts out is beside the point. What matters is the
>structure of the message. Most traditional Internet email clients, such
>as elm or mutt, give you a document like this:
>
>___cut_here___
>John Galt wrote:
>> Elm predates any microsoft email product...  Try to quote stuff in elm,
>> the cursor goes to the beginning of the text.
>
>___cut_here___
>
>The use of angle-bracket quote marks on the left margin makes it easy to
>tell what text is new and what is quoted, facilitating proper replies.
>Moving the cursor to the bottom is trivial, and I think it's best that
>the client not do that automatically, as it would discourage the user
>from cutting out irrelevant material from the quoted message. (In fact,
>it is easily observed that most people who reply at the top fail to trim
>the quoted text.)
>
>Microsoft's mail clients, on the other hand, give you something like this:
>
>___cut_here___
>
>
>--- Original message ---
>From: John Galt
>
>Elm predates any microsoft email product...  Try to quote stuff in elm,
>the cursor goes to the beginning of the text.
>___cut_here___
>
>Note that they provide no left-margin quote marks, nor any indication of
>where the original message ends, and they leave a blank line or two at
>the top, implying that your reply should go there (otherwise, why put
>it there?).
>
>Craig
>
>
>

-- 
EMACS == Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

Who is John Galt?  galt@inconnu.isu.edu, that's who!