On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 11:59:55AM -0600, David Young wrote: > >On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 04:42:13PM +0000, John Long wrote: […] > > Mail and news need to have sane line lengths. 72 or 76 chars are common. It > > makes people look like AOL groupies when they post 500 character lines. Many > > of us use console news clients and newsreaders. Is this discussion really > > happening on a mailing list for mutt, a console email client? > > > > Take some responsibility for yourself and your content. Post like a man not > > a webbot. > > I cannot believe people are still hewing to this old line. It's like > thousands of people fell asleep at their teletypes (I mean the kind that > printed on paper) in the 1970s and woke up in 2012. "What, you have > computers in your pockets but there is no conformance to the width in > columns of 40 year-old data terminals any more?" > > Tony is right, it's not reasonable with the variety of display widths, > today, to hold people to One, True Email Width. It's also not > reasonable to demand that people rigidly conform with strict technical > standards when software can (and should) do it for them. In other > words, don't treat people like robots. > > The variety and richness of email is large and growing, but the power > and variety of software for reading and writing email is pretty small. > Every now and then some jerk sends me an email reply where their > contribution is red. Maybe that is worth fighting about on grounds > that that's a poor choice of color for readability, but not on grounds > that my console is monochrome. I receive a lot of top-posted replies, > bottom-posted replies, and inline replies. In conversations, sometimes > there are mixtures of all three of those styles and then some---try to > read those conversations three months later! Software could digest > a lot of this email that doesn't conform to my taste, priorities, > available time, attention, perceptual strengths and weaknesses, and > spit out something that's not only more palatable but more useful, but > software doesn't do that.
On a ML, people tend to post regarding a problem they are having. If a person who could possibly help them has to jump through hoops just to read what they have written, it is likely they'd just press the delete key, rather than waste their own time. It's as simple as that. Another way to look at it is: "If someone can't take the time to write their post in a clear and legible manner, why should anyone waste their time replying to it." Don't confuse pink whizz bang pop sha-ping pzzang flashing things which "kids" use to "keep in touch" with email netiquette on mailing lists. > One reason email software is not more useful is that because too many > smart people wage a losing war on the new, foreign ways of email instead > of programming filters that transform top-posted, red, 5000-column > emails to the style of email that they want to read. That's just sad. On a mailing list? Wouldn't bother reading it, straight in the rubbish. (American translation: trash, dumpster.) P.S. It is sad that this topic is actually having to be discussed on **THIS** mailing list. Another tear in the fabric of decency. :( -- "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." --- Malcolm X
