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Kent West
Guest
|
 Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2005 10:19 pm Post subject: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
 |
|
At the risk of starting yet another war about top-posting, I just came
across this (year-old) blog by what appears to be the guy who wrote
(with a couple of others) the IMAP support in Microsoft's Entourage
("Outlook for the Mac") product.
Two things he said that caught my attention:
1) He says he likes IMAP (so do I)
and
2) He prefers the intersperse method of replying, like what this Debian
User list encourages, rather than the top-posting method used by
Outlook. He even uses Thunderbird as an example of an email client that
gets it right. A quote:
"*Executive Summary*: Thunderbird
<http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/> is an almost perfect IMAP
client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you."
I just found that interesting, and thought I'd pass it on.
http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/archive/2004/02/19/76061.aspx
--
Kent West
Technology Support
/A/bilene /C/hristian /U/niversity
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Steve Lamb
Guest
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| Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2005 10:19 pm Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
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Stephen R Laniel wrote:
| Quote: | I wonder if I may be so bold as to suggest the final word
about top- or bottom-posting. Here it is:
|
Nope. Here's the final word.
| Quote: | Your email program should be smart enough to customize to
your preference.
|
Pipe dream.
| Quote: | Email messages should look like so:
message
<messageWereReplyingTo
This is some stuff that a guy wrote
</messageWereReplyingTo
<whatWeSayInResponse
I disagree vehemently with whatever you said
</whatWeSayInResponse
/message
|
Now define interspersing like I've just done along with proper trimming,
which I've done, and try to cram it into XML so as to appease the clueful and
the clueless through specious clint preferences. Can't bedone for 2 reasons:
1: I have trimmed the original message.
2: Because I an interspersing my reply some of my comments only make sense
when the context provided by proper quoting is provided.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
-------------------------------+--------------------------------------------- |
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Stephen R Laniel
Guest
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| Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2005 10:20 pm Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
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On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 02:52:41PM -0500, Kent West wrote:
| Quote: | At the risk of starting yet another war about top-posting, I just came
across this (year-old) blog by what appears to be the guy who wrote
(with a couple of others) the IMAP support in Microsoft's Entourage
("Outlook for the Mac") product.
|
I wonder if I may be so bold as to suggest the final word
about top- or bottom-posting. Here it is:
Your email program should be smart enough to customize to
your preference.
Email messages should look like so:
<message>
<messageWereReplyingTo>
This is some stuff that a guy wrote
</messageWereReplyingTo>
<whatWeSayInResponse>
I disagree vehemently with whatever you said
</whatWeSayInResponse>
</message>
Then if I want to display the response on top, I can; if I
want to display the original message on top, I can do that
too.
Programs can hack their way to this now, by assuming that
any line starting with N '>'s is an N-levels-deep message
earlier in the thread. The XML approach could lead to all
sorts of improvements -- e.g., we could have
<messageWereReplyingTo>
<messageID id="[blahblahblah]@TheloniousMonk.laniels.org" />
<body>
This is some stuff that a guy wrote
</body>
</messageWereReplyingTo>
Since the messageID is embedded in the part that we're
replying to, smart clients would allow us to click on the
quoted part and jump back to the original message to read
the full context. It would make email threading a lot more
useful.
The whole top- versus bottom-posting debate is pretty bush
league, I think. We should have stopped *needing* to talk
about it around 1995.
--
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key |
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Lorenzo Taylor
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 3:30 am Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Stephen R Laniel's comments on Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting were as follows:
# On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 02:52:41PM -0500, Kent West wrote:
# <message>
# <messageWereReplyingTo>
# This is some stuff that a guy wrote
# </messageWereReplyingTo>
#
# <whatWeSayInResponse>
# I disagree vehemently with whatever you said
# </whatWeSayInResponse>
# </message>
Wow! I really like the XML approach. But how are you going to get all the
email programs in the world to use it? It seems too late to make such a smart
new approach to email a standard now as old as email is. Then again, if HTML
email is accepted in so many circles, (not here but ...) why not XML email
everywhere? It's a much better approach than anything that has been thought up
thus far.
Let's take it one step further:
<message>
<from name="Me" address="me@me.net" />
<to name="You" address="you@you.com" />
... multiple recipients get their own <to> headers
<cc name="Somebody Else" address="somebody@else.org" />
... same as to for multiples
... other headers in same format ...
<body>
<quote>
I think you are an email junky.
</quote>
<response>
No I'm not! I have attached the reason why not.
</response>
<quote>
You read too much email.
</quote>
<response>
It gives me something to do.
</response>
</body>
<attach filename="notajunky.xml" type="application/xml"
description="Why I'm not an email junky" size="26k">
Put a file in here. The program will do all this for you
including filling in the size and mimetype.
</attach>
</message>
Hey. I can dream can't I?
Lorenzo
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Andy Streich
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 4:19 am Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
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On Thursday 07 July 2005 07:45 pm, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
| Quote: | The trouble is that everybody has different standards: some
like inline quotes, some like top-posting, and some like
bottom-posting. Rather than get exercised about others'
aesthetic choices, we should let our programs format our
mail the way we want.
|
Which is why I like KMail but I'm running it on a -- by today's standards --
low-powered system (PII, 400 Mhz, 128 ram, 6 GB hard drive). If the
receivers of your mail are all on cool, modern, "big" systems then you've no
worries. But KMail takes up nearly 30% of my available RAM, and I'm
searching for an alternative which likely won't have all it's capabilities.
Andy
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Stephen R Laniel
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 4:19 am Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
|
|
On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 07:22:23PM -0400, Lorenzo Taylor wrote:
| Quote: | Wow! I really like the XML approach. But how are you going to get all the
email programs in the world to use it? It seems too late to make such a smart
new approach to email a standard now as old as email is. Then again, if HTML
email is accepted in so many circles, (not here but ...) why not XML email
everywhere? It's a much better approach than anything that has been thought up
thus far.
|
It would have to be a voluntary type standard. The Unix
flat-file standard is pretty played out, I'd say.
Interesting local-file formats use clever databases and so
forth to make virtual folders work. It seems like we should
have moved past the flat-file format years ago.
I've had similar ideas recently about using XML for conf
files in /etc, but that would take a bit of elaboration.
I'll save that for another time.
| Quote: | <body
<quote
I think you are an email junky.
</quote
<response
No I'm not! I have attached the reason why not.
</response
|
Incidentally, this would response to the other fellow who
asked how to extend the XML format to interspersing quotes
with responses. You could even do something like
<body>
<quote messageID="foo">
Some stuff
</quote>
<quote messageID="bar">
Some stuff from another message
</quote>
<reply>
Some stuff that I wrote about:
<quote messageID="aThirdMessageID">
Some tripe
</quote>
</body>
--
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key |
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Stephen R Laniel
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 4:19 am Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
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On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 08:47:48PM -0500, Jacob S wrote:
| Quote: | Ugh... and I thought HTML e-mail took a ton of disk space compared to
plain text. An inline reply would make the e-mail more than double in
size!
|
XML is chatty. But please: a few hundred extra megabytes
won't kill you. Not on hard disks that *start* at 40 gigs.
| Quote: | What happened to humans being smart enough to make things look neat and
clean?
|
The trouble is that everybody has different standards: some
like inline quotes, some like top-posting, and some like
bottom-posting. Rather than get exercised about others'
aesthetic choices, we should let our programs format our
mail the way we want.
--
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key |
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Jacob S
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 4:19 am Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
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On Thu, 7 Jul 2005 19:22:23 -0400
Lorenzo Taylor <lorenzo@taylor.homelinux.net> wrote:
| Quote: | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Stephen R Laniel's comments on Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting
were as follows: # On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 02:52:41PM -0500, Kent West
wrote: # <message
# <messageWereReplyingTo
# This is some stuff that a guy wrote
# </messageWereReplyingTo
#
# <whatWeSayInResponse
# I disagree vehemently with whatever you said
# </whatWeSayInResponse
# </message
Wow! I really like the XML approach. But how are you going to get
all the email programs in the world to use it? It seems too late to
make such a smart new approach to email a standard now as old as email
is. Then again, if HTML email is accepted in so many circles, (not
here but ...) why not XML email everywhere? It's a much better
approach than anything that has been thought up thus far.
Let's take it one step further:
snip - pseudo-xml content |
Ugh... and I thought HTML e-mail took a ton of disk space compared to
plain text. An inline reply would make the e-mail more than double in
size!
What happened to humans being smart enough to make things look neat and
clean?
When I first came to this list, I observed how others posted, received a
few tips when I messed up and the rest of my time has been spent helping
and being helped. I knew that to get help from this list I would need to
follow _this lists's_ rules. What's so hard about that? (And I'm a young
guy... not some old 'dinosaur' that cut their teeth on CP/M. 
Just my $0.02.
Jacob
P.S. No, this is not meant as a flame and notice that I did not use any
upper case words - I was not yelling or mad. :-)
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Lorenzo Taylor
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 9:40 am Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Stephen R Laniel's comments on Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting were as follows:
# I've had similar ideas recently about using XML for conf
# files in /etc, but that would take a bit of elaboration.
# I'll save that for another time.
Wow! A good idea, but a lot of sysadmins wouldn't go for it. To some, XML is
nice, bit they prefer key=value conf files. They are easier for a hand-coding
sysadmin like myself to write, but even I as a hand-coder could go for the XML
approach.
# <body>
# <quote messageID="foo">
# Some stuff
# </quote>
#
# <quote messageID="bar">
# Some stuff from another message
# </quote>
#
# <reply>
# Some stuff that I wrote about:
#
# <quote messageID="aThirdMessageID">
# Some tripe
# </quote>
# </body>
This is why it's called "extensible markup language". We could all be doing
things with email that until today no one even thought possible. But since
there is currently no XML standard, a few like-minded people like us will have
to draft it, or else we will have to watch someone else do it, like MS, who is
now using XML for all their office document formats. Good for them for once. ;-)
Lorenzo
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Jacob S
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 10:18 am Post subject: Re: OT xml documents (Was: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting) |
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|
On Fri, 8 Jul 2005 01:30:52 -0400
Lorenzo Taylor <lorenzo@taylor.homelinux.net> wrote:
<snip - discussion about xml for e-mail>
| Quote: | This is why it's called "extensible markup language". We could all be
doing things with email that until today no one even thought possible.
But since
there is currently no XML standard, a few like-minded people like us
will have to draft it, or else we will have to watch someone else do
it, like MS, who is now using XML for all their office document
formats. Good for them for once. 
|
You do realize that OpenOffice has been using XML for it's documents
since it was forked from StarOffice, right? It's simply zipped 1) so
that it looks like a single file 2) so it's smaller (same as M$ has said
they will be doing with their xml Office documents, actually).
So we're not having to sit back and watch M$ do something good in this
case. Instead we get to watch them *copy* us and then pat them on the
back for finally joining our crowd. :-)
HAND,
Jacob
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Steve Lamb
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 10:18 am Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
|
|
Stephen R Laniel wrote:
| Quote: | XML is chatty. But please: a few hundred extra megabytes
won't kill you. Not on hard disks that *start* at 40 gigs.
|
Now apply that to the providers that have to transport and store several
hundred thousand in a day.
| Quote: | The trouble is that everybody has different standards: some
like inline quotes, some like top-posting, and some like
bottom-posting. Rather than get exercised about others'
aesthetic choices, we should let our programs format our
mail the way we want.
|
Not possible because, as I pointed out, when one intersperses the response
they should be trimming and replying based on context. Because of this it is
impossible to made code to present it as people want it because not only is
information mission from trimming but taking an interspersed reply and
removing all context means at times it would make no sense.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
-------------------------------+--------------------------------------------- |
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Steve Lamb
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 10:19 am Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
|
|
Jacob S wrote:
| Quote: | What happened to humans being smart enough to make things look neat and
clean?
|
It went away around the time when humans stopped taking responsibility for
their own actions.
| Quote: | When I first came to this list, I observed how others posted, received a
few tips when I messed up and the rest of my time has been spent helping
and being helped. I knew that to get help from this list I would need to
follow _this lists's_ rules.
|
[snippage]
| Quote: | P.S. No, this is not meant as a flame and notice that I did not use any
upper case words - I was not yelling or mad.
|
Nope, you're mad. List rules that posting to a thread like this you have
to be frothing at the mouth like you've just eaten a double back of
alka-seltzer. :D
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
-------------------------------+--------------------------------------------- |
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Haines Brown
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 2:30 pm Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
|
|
| Quote: | On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 07:22:23PM -0400, Lorenzo Taylor wrote:
Wow! I really like the XML approach. But how are you going to get all t=
he
email programs in the world to use it? It seems too late to make such a =
smart
new approach to email a standard now as old as email is. Then again, if =
HTML
email is accepted in so many circles, (not here but ...) why not XML email
everywhere? It's a much better approach than anything that has been thou=
ght up
thus far.
It would have to be a voluntary type standard. The Unix
flat-file standard is pretty played out, I'd say.
|
....
| Quote: | Incidentally, this would response to the other fellow who
asked how to extend the XML format to interspersing quotes
with responses. You could even do something like
body
<quote messageID=3D"foo"
.... |
Sorry to join an interesting discussion in mid-stream, and hope I'm
not making points already offered.
It is my impression that, for good practical reasons, the goal is to
sharply separate the form and content of text, and so I suppose that
XML is inevitable. The transition to it may be challenging, but I don't
see that there is much of an alternative, given our need in this
emerging new world to make communications universal. However, this
assumes that text is ultimately human-readable, or more generally,
useful to some client device that interprets format in its own
distinctive way.
However, I need text that is "machine-readable" - that is,
intelligible for processing by the "server device" - me. I
constantly need to manipulate text independently of any format
markup. It would not be difficult to strip away the XML markup
automatically or transparently. Although my mail reader (rmail under
emacs) is wedded to plain text, I can "disappear" any markup if I
need to. So XML markup is an annoyance at this point, but if it
became standard, I could adjust.
Until then, markups are a pain. The passages I've quoted above are
an example. I had the impression the "=" to mark a carriage return was
a peculiar effect of Windows editors, and my emacs re-fill command
treats them as an ordinary character, not a line wrap. This is not
stupidity on emacs' part, for how does a Windows application
distinguish a "=" control character from a plain ASCII character?
Also, the "=3D" hex notation. My browser, when confronted with it does
not interpret it properly as "=", but literally as "=3D". I suspect
this markup is intended solely for Internet Explorer (in order to
promote Billy's monopoly).
If this is a hint that peoples' editors are not even respecting
current standards, then the transition to XML as the standard will
indeed be a rocky road.
--
Haines Brown
KB1GRM
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Michael Marsh
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 4:00 pm Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
|
|
On 7/8/05, Haines Brown <brownh@hartford-hwp.com> wrote:
| Quote: | Until then, markups are a pain. The passages I've quoted above are
an example. I had the impression the "=" to mark a carriage return was
a peculiar effect of Windows editors, and my emacs re-fill command
treats them as an ordinary character, not a line wrap. This is not
stupidity on emacs' part, for how does a Windows application
distinguish a "=" control character from a plain ASCII character?
Also, the "=3D" hex notation. My browser, when confronted with it does
not interpret it properly as "=", but literally as "=3D". I suspect
this markup is intended solely for Internet Explorer (in order to
promote Billy's monopoly).
|
That's not markup, it's MIME encapsulation. OK, perhaps you can
consider quoted-printable encapsulation as a form of markup, but it's
distinctly different than something like XML or HTML.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com |
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Stephen R Laniel
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 4:20 pm Post subject: Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting |
|
|
On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 01:44:08AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
| Quote: | Now apply that to the providers that have to transport and store several
hundred thousand in a day.
|
Oh, the overworked sysadmin with limited disk space. I read
about him and his overloaded servers just the other day in
the pages of Life Magazine. There was a tear in the corner
of his eye as he described his plight: his family never saw
him anymore because he had four gigabytes more mail to go
through everyday; his servers were near to bursting ... I
won't lie to you, I cried. I'm not ashamed to admit it.
This XML format would be no more of a burden on sysadmins
than HTML email or large attachments. Less, in fact.
| Quote: | Not possible because, as I pointed out, when one intersperses the response
they should be trimming and replying based on context. Because of this it is
impossible to made code to present it as people want it because not only is
information mission from trimming but taking an interspersed reply and
removing all context means at times it would make no sense.
|
The word 'impossible' seems overdone.
Here's one way I can think of to do it, offhand: include the
entire quoted message somewhere else (say, a MIME
attachment to the response). Then use interspersed quotes
like so:
<message>
<quote messageID="foo" startingByteNumber="30">
Here's some text I'm
</quote>
<response>
AND DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE THE ABSURDITY IN WHAT MY
OPPONENT SAYS? I AM SHOCKED -- SHOCKED!
</response>
<quote messageID="foo" startingByteNumber="50">
brassed off about
</quote>
</message>
The startingByteNumber refers to the message with
messageID=foo.
There's a difficulty with this, obviously, which is that
we'd have to hold the quoted message as an attachment. So
what do we do if our response quotes a message that contains
a 10-messages-deep nested quote? Do we have to hold all 10
messages as attachments in the response?
So there are challenges. But the word 'impossible' seems
excessive.
--
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key |
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