Re: Gwebdec (Solved)
David R. Litwin wrote:
> Now that's a fine Idea.
and in the "Gwebdec" thread he wrote:
> No. Gwebdec is a Webshots for Linux, in essence.
and in the "ifconfig" thread he wrote:
> Firslty, I'm not quite sure what you mean by the Top Post Thread
> Comment. I've not been paying attention to it. Should I? It seems it
> discusses the pros and cons of putting a post in a new E-Mail, or
> inserting it in to the last one. If this is so, which should I be doing?
No, the "Top-Posting" thread discusses the merits of replying to an
email by putting your reply at the top of the previous message text, at
the bottom, or interspersed throughout. It also discusses trimming away
unnecessary text, and leaving enough text to provide context for your reply.
In each of the three replies above, you've erased all evidence of the
previous emails to which you're responding. The only way that list
readers will know what you're talking about is to either remember the
context from previous emails (and that's a considerable burden to place
on the readers with such a high-volume mailing list) or to go back and
look at the previous emails in the archives (again, a burden you're
placing on your readers).
In the second quote above, I assume you're responding to someone who
guessed what Gwebdec is, but got it wrong; you're correcting him. But
I'm not going to spend my time and effort to go find the previous email
to get the context. Instead, I'm just going to dangle, making
assumptions about what your email is all about.
In the first quote above, the situation is even worse. What is a fine
idea? Installing Gwebdec? Installing it via make? Installing the GTK 2.0
dev libraries? Exiting from root? Without context, all we can do is
remember or go search the archives or assume.
Concerning top-posting, lots of people have been trained in recent years
by certain (*ahem*) email programs to put their replies to messages at
the top of the previous email. After three or four rounds of this,
you've got an entire conversation that's written backwards. That's okay
in some contexts, but for reasons I won't go into here (see the thread
for more info), most of us on this list find that to be, well, backwards.
Instead, you should intersperse your comments just after the material to
which you're replying, just as happens in real life. For example, you
write an email that says:
> My dog is smart.
> My girlfriend is pretty.
> My mom loves me.
And I reply:
> Yeah, but do you let her lick your face?
>
>> My dog is smart.
>> My girlfriend is pretty.
>> My mom loves me.
>
Am I talking about your dog, your girlfriend, or your mom (ew-w-w!)? If
I instead reply like so:
>> My dog is smart.
>
> Yeah, but do you let her lick your face?
>
>> My girlfriend is pretty.
>> My mom loves me.
>
then it's pretty clear I'm talking about your dog.
----
Thanks for letting us know that you got Gwebdec working.
--
Kent
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