Offtopic noise: Re: BBC iPlayer viewers now need a...

[David Woodhouse]

On Mon, 2016-05-16 at 20:58 +0100, Owen Smith wrote:
> 
> 25 years ago you always replied to emails by adding your text to the
> bottom, or replying inline in the quotes, and email clients expected
> it to be done that way. I'm not entirely sure when this changed, but
> I get the feeling Microsoft had a lot to do with it.

It didn't "change" per se. It is still good practice to carefully trim
your citations to cite *precisely* what you need to for context and no
more, and to place specific responses immediately below those
citations.

Yes, I'm aware that there are a number of mail clients, especially on
mobile devices, which make that hard. But I read a lot of email, and it
is generally the case that the top-posted ones are much less coherent
than the "properly" composed ones.

There might be many reasons for that; both causation and correlation. 

One is probably that you're no longer *reading* the message to which
you're replying, as you compose your reply. So you miss things. I often
misread messages at first, and realise my mistake as I'm actually
*composing* a response. I tend to see it as I re-read the citation I'm
about to respond to... which wouldn't happen if I were top-posting. I
also see a number of top-posted messages where the sender obviously
hasn't quite understood what they're responding to — where responding
"properly" may well have helped, as it does me.

There's also comprehension for the recipient. I've also seen a lot of
top-posted messages with a one-line response or question where it's not
entirely clear *what* that one line is responding to, in the whole of
the mail that's blindly cited below. With correctly formatted replies,
it's easy to cite one line, and put your own one-line response
immediately below it. And even where the meaning *can* be discerned, I
often find myself jumping back and forth in a top-posted message,
trying to match each part of the response to the misplaced citation
which *should* have been right next to it. It's a horrible waste of
time, and makes reading such messages extremely inefficient.

And generally, there is just a lack of precision which cannot be
otherwise explained. This is the 'correlation' part. Perhaps it's just
because grumpy pedants like to stick to the "old ways", and grumpy
pedants are also quite keen on expressing themselves clearly and using
the language correctly; I don't know. But a top-posted message is just
much more likely to be one of those "wtf were they smoking and what do
they think those words even mean" experiences.

In a world where I see a *lot* of email on a *lot* of mailing lists,
and I need to pick and choose which ones I'm even going to bother
reading (and potentially replying to someone who needs help), I have
learned that HTML and top-posted messages are generally much less
coherent and interesting than properly formed responses. The problem
reports therein are much less likely to actually include the
information I need to help, and the problem is much *more* likely to
exist between keyboard and chair, and not be something that actually
needs *fixing*.

It also takes (a tiny amount of) extra effort to do things properly, so
top-posting can also be perceived as lazy. If I ever top-post, it's
almost certainly because I *am* lazy. I'm lying on my arse using my
phone or tablet, and can't *even* be bothered to switch to webmail to
reply properly. (It usually happens off-list.)

For all these reasons, if you post HTML, and if you top-post, then you
are just less likely to get technical assistance because certain people
(the grumpy pedants who are often most likely to be able to help) are
less interested in what you have to say.

But sure, this list can stay (I was just checking) and we can continue
to have this conversation repeatedly... :)

(How do you survive in Cambridge without NNTP and thus without cam.misc
though!)

-- 
dwmw2
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