Chris Bannister grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
> Subject adjusted to be more meaningfull.
Just as a side note, for a long time, the typical standard when changing
a subject line to reflect topic-drift evolution of a discussion has been
to change the subject thus:
Subject: New Subject (was Re: Old Subject)
It's not practical to keep *every* old subject if the the topic migrates
more than once, obviously, but the most recent "old" subject is
preserved that way.
Just sayin'.... :-)
Anyway, it seems that I missed Ethan's original posting, so I hope
you'll forgive me for tagging onto your reply in order to reply to him.
> On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 12:35:07PM -0400, Ethan Rosenberg, PhD wrote:
>> Dear List -
>>
>> I appreciate your CONSTRUCTIVE criticism. I surely do not wish to
>> have my posts unanswered.
>>
>> Introduction -
>>
>> Industrial standard I think is, top quoting and styled email.
For literally decades, common E-Mail etiquette (and thus the defacto
standard) for replies (even in one-on-one conversations) has been the
quote-and-reply style that you see here, trimming the parts you don't
need (and any signatures), etc.
Along the way, Microsoft got involved and produced Outlook (and Outlook
Express) as a mail client. A *lot* (unfortunately) of companies use
Outlook as their mail client, and since OE just *comes* with current
versions of Windows, which lots and lots of desktop users have/had that
as their first E-Mail experience.
Microsoft has a long history of not exactly giving a rat's ass about any
standard that they did not have a hand in the creation of, so they
completely ignored the long-standing etiquette rules, which means that
Outlook users have a VERY hard time of quoting in the proper
quote-and-reply style, and by default does the quote in a way that
leaves the replier top-posting. I'm pretty sure that's how the whole
so-called "industrial standard" of top-posting came about.
A lot of new people to the net probably used OE as their first mail
program (just a guess here, but it seems a reasonable one given that it
comes with Windows, etc.) and got into that quoting habit. So now there
are plenty of E-Mail choices, but the new people coming in see what
other people are quoting like, decide that must be the way of doing it,
and start doing it as well. Plus, it's lazy since they never bother to
remove old stuff that doesn't even need to be in the reply anymore (in
the case of long discussions). In the case of a mailing list, it just
makes conversations taking place among multiple posters a lot harder to
follow, and a lot of people will stop following a given discussion where
someone keeps posting on top - possibly including people who might have
the answer to the OP's question. :-) Whereas the inline quote-and-reply
such as you see us doing here emulates a more natural conversational
pattern, thus making it easy for anyone reading to follow the conversation.
>> This is the way my Thunderbird is set. Mail list requirements are the
>> reverse as I well know. Therefore, I have to adjust Thunderbird to
>> these requirements.
That may be the way that YOU have it set, but it's not a default setting
for Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird, myself, and I can assure you that I
didn't have to make any adjustments to create this reply. :-)
>> The material above my reply is blue.
I'm one of those net.old.fogies who firmly believes that HTML belongs in
web pages, not E-Mail (and there are lots of people, regardless of their
net.old.fogie-or-not-ititude who share that thought). As such, I have
my default compose style set to plain text. And, since it seems that
there are a lot of people out there who think that making their message
"pretty" is more important than what they actually have to say, I have
the reader set to only *render* plain text. So no, I didn't see the
"blue" in your text. (And that's the other thing to consider - not
everyone uses the same mail program you do, nor if they do has it set up
the same way that you do; you can't assume that just because *you* see
something in a given color or style, that anyone else is going to see it
that way.)
Regardless of those preferences, on a mailing list where you don't know
what mail program someone reading is going to be using, it's always a
bad idea to use HTML in posting a message. Sure, at this point the
majority of mail readers can render HTML. But ALL mail readers (even
the ones that understand HTML) can render plain text. Not to mention
the size increase of messages written using HTML, but that's another
subject....
I hope this (rather lengthy reply, sorry about that :-) ) gives you a
bit better insight into the matter. :-)
--Dave
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