[plug] Top posting?

[Bernd Felsche]

On Wednesday 23 June 2004 09:21, Clare Johnstone wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Onno Benschop wrote:
> > paragraph I wrote needed to make sense on its own, it would have to be
> > re-written like this:
> >     Sight impaired people using screen readers is the *first*...

> ... Surely these [snip] people would
> thread their mail, and so would know what the previous
> contributors had said.

Onno may have overlooked the possibility of text-to-speech software
being able to *skip* quoted context.

Also, the nature of email is not one where the entire thread is
always available at the time of being read. If I were to delete a
message out of a thread in one session, then the thread would be
broken for a subsequent session.

I don't honestly believe that individuals archive complete threads.
I've seen people email themselves backups; and leave a copy in their
"sent" folder, but even that's rare.

If people subscribe to or communicate with many email participants,
the message context may not even be threaded. e.g. were I to make
reference to the anti-spam thread in the current PLUG flow.

Some people are just crazy enough to carry on a dozen or more
email-based conversations "at a time". Putting the onus on the user
to know what was previously said is then an onerous task.

> Even reading this plug list is a pain because of having to page down thru
> the same stuff time after time for a short comment.

Extracting the essence of quoted material by careful deletion of all
but the relevant material is comparatively hard work; especially in
the current climate of an incoherent mish-mash of words being used
to convey ideas.

But that's not even an excuse to be lazy. If the original text is
convoluted, then it's also valid to snip the bulk and to
paraphrase/summarize what one understands the quoted text to say.

-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
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