--On Thursday, September 23, 2010 10:43 -0700 Randy Dunlap
<rdunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
>> the same people also complain when I trim.
>>
>> So its a combination of pathological behaviours, UI, and
>> dominance behaviour
>
> That should just be a function of where the UI software
> positions the cursor, shouldn't it?
Well, it is a bit more than that. If one had a UI that combines:
-- Small screen with tricky selection and scrolling
-- Insertion of prior messages in the reply with a
"---original message--" line above them, rather than
quoting. Note that, when this is done, the cursor
inevitably ends up above the message.
-- No mechanism for selecting which text is to be quoted
as part of the "reply" command (or button, or whatever)
or even any two of those, then one is quite likely to see
top-posting -- almost anything else is just too time-consuming.
In a better world, the "right" solution to that type of problem
is certainly "go find a decent MUA". But, in a world in which
the number of MUAs that are well-designed and competently
maintained to keep up with technology developments appears to be
rapidly declining, the decision to switch tends to involve
complex usability and feature tradeoffs, not a straightforward
decision to go to something better.
In (slight) defense of top-posting (which I definitely choose to
do sometimes), if one is replying very briefly and in summary to
a long and complex message, it is often more efficient for both
the writer and the reader. One should clearly also trim the
long message, but, if people get in a hurry and forget ... well,
I would hope that we will never again see a time in which the
bandwidth or disk space requirements for a few extra paragraphs
are sufficiently expensive to be more important than people's
time.
FWIW, the thing that really irritates me is having someone
respond to a message after quoting only a few lines (often good)
but without supplying some clue that permits me to find the
message being replied to if needed. Whether that is done by
inserting some sort of attribution line, copying the author of
the prior message on the reply, or even using a good In-reply-to
field, assuming that one can quote a few lines, without
attribution, because the recipient has "obviously" read the
prior sequence of messages --in sequence and recently-- is just
unrealistic, at least IMO. Again, the causes of the problem of
replies without prior message context are often more poor UA
design than bad user behavior, but that brings us back to the
declining population of decent UAs.
john
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