7 ms·

This is almost 20 years old technology has changed a lot since then. Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default. People don't treat email

by buugs 13y ago

This is almost 20 years old technology has changed a lot since then. Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default. People don't treat email the same (who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore). Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top quote. Threading is a bit better. Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading.

e12e 13y ago
> Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default. Which clients? > Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top > quote. Outlook already did this. At least with Outlook, the UI is broken, so people understand what you mean when you complain. Gmail being smart, people have a hard time grasping what you mean when you try to get them to quote "smart". And both approaches are wrong (IMNHO). > Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the > whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I > hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I > personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading. Why would you have to scroll when "[e]mail clients hide quotes by default" ? Anyway, lets not continue this into a flame war about top/bottom/proper quoting -- but I'm genuinely confused about your points above (they seem to contradict each other?). I really need to play a bit with sup -- I hear they did a lot of things right. For what it's worth, I think threading with quoting/conversations is still an unsolved problem (and I'm not just talking corner-cases and presence/absence of word wrap etc -- just what is the best way to present a conversation that a) makes conversation flow easily, and with readily available (correct amounts) of context while it is active, and b) reads like a reasonable transcript/conversation without too much redundancy for someone seeing the thread after the conversation has started. So far I think manually quoted replies, with bottom posting is by far the best). > who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore Most people on high-quality discussion lists? I think this goes more towards a "what is email as a medium"-type thing. Sometimes a quick reply is fine -- but if you are writing more than a paragraph, it is probably worth the time to put some effort into it (ironically, actively counteracted by things like hn's simple text-input field -- unless you invoke a proper editor, for example using the "It's all text!"-firefox extension, or ctrl-i for external editor with vimperator). I think it's more that people don't really compose emails anymore -- they don't invoke a proper editor (whatever that may be for the user in question -- but something that at least allows a minimum of easy copy/cut/paste -- I would say vim/emacs, some might want something a little more modern). But when you're given an augmented text-field (the so-called rich web editors) -- ofcourse you won't be writing much. It's a horrible writing/editing experience.

by buugs 13y ago

e12e 13y ago

> Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default. Which clients? > Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top > quote. Outlook already did this. At least with Outlook, the UI is broken, so people understand what you mean when you complain. Gmail being smart, people have a hard time grasping what you mean when you try to get them to quote "smart". And both approaches are wrong (IMNHO). > Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the > whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I > hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I > personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading. Why would you have to scroll when "[e]mail clients hide quotes by default" ? Anyway, lets not continue this into a flame war about top/bottom/proper quoting -- but I'm genuinely confused about your points above (they seem to contradict each other?). I really need to play a bit with sup -- I hear they did a lot of things right. For what it's worth, I think threading with quoting/conversations is still an unsolved problem (and I'm not just talking corner-cases and presence/absence of word wrap etc -- just what is the best way to present a conversation that a) makes conversation flow easily, and with readily available (correct amounts) of context while it is active, and b) reads like a reasonable transcript/conversation without too much redundancy for someone seeing the thread after the conversation has started. So far I think manually quoted replies, with bottom posting is by far the best). > who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore Most people on high-quality discussion lists? I think this goes more towards a "what is email as a medium"-type thing. Sometimes a quick reply is fine -- but if you are writing more than a paragraph, it is probably worth the time to put some effort into it (ironically, actively counteracted by things like hn's simple text-input field -- unless you invoke a proper editor, for example using the "It's all text!"-firefox extension, or ctrl-i for external editor with vimperator). I think it's more that people don't really compose emails anymore -- they don't invoke a proper editor (whatever that may be for the user in question -- but something that at least allows a minimum of easy copy/cut/paste -- I would say vim/emacs, some might want something a little more modern). But when you're given an augmented text-field (the so-called rich web editors) -- ofcourse you won't be writing much. It's a horrible writing/editing experience.