Re: Top posting (a different point of view)
On Friday 10 June 2005 17.46, Roger B.A. Klorese wrote:
> Joe Potter wrote:
> >That, of course, is the main point you made. I put all this in the lap
> >of Bill Gates --- the miserable ass. He is never happy unless he is
> >destroying some standard and replacing it with crap of some kind.
>
> Outlook does it this way not to be contrary, but for an obvious reason:
> it works better for the people who use it.
>
> If you're involved in a discussion, and you're tracking it all --
> because if you don't you're fired -- you want to see the most
> up-to-date addition to the discussion, and for the 5% of the time you
> need reminding, you can scroll down. The immediate previous bit will
> probably remind you, and if not, the bit before that, etc. It's much
> more useful for that sort of discussion than bottom-posting. And I'm
> not speaking as a Windows-brainwashed suit -- I've been using Unix
> tools since 1984 and email since 1975.
More importantly, I think it would be difficult to use bottom-posting with
html mail or rtf text or whatever it is called. And while plain text is
better in most situations, I have to admit there are situations where
formatted text can be useful. For example, sometimes you want to include
an image at a certain position in the e-mail, underline, make text bold,
color a certain text, include links without cluttering the text with long
http addresses. I use that when I paste code snippets and colored code
diffs, include links to defect reports etc in my daily work. And I
suppose we shouldn't forget all the other non-technical people who want
to format their e-mails with background images and fancy type faces.
Anyway, finding a technical solution that allows that to be combined with
bottom-posting would probably be difficult to implement, although I would
love to see it. Sadly Lotus Notes doesn't seem to handle it very well,
same as Outlook and the like.
--
Olle Eriksson
mail@olle-eriksson.com | http://www.olle-eriksson.com
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