With the title following the content, one might lose the association with the
prior thread. Putting the original message at the top and the reply at the
bottom has the problem you mention, and putting the reply at the top and the
quoted message at the bottom makes the thread hard to follow, particularly as
there are often forks in the discussion. Following them is often a problem in
itself, which, among others, Tony Duell handles at times by splitting his
replies based on the subject. Unfortunately, there's still no easy way to
track the context if the title is to serve a a pointer to the thread that
contained the original "fork" in the thread.
Embedding replies to individual points in the quoted post addresses these
problems to greater or lesser satisfaction, but requires quoting more of the
original text in order to bind the questions to the answers.
A change in the subject line would make it difficult to follow a prolific
thread by search. A search of all the messages for a given text string
produces too many hits on unrelated threads, since we all tend to use similar
phrases at times.
What's a guy to do?
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marvin Johnston" <marvin_at_rain.org>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 12:37 AM
Subject: Re: OT email response format (was Re: TTL computing)
>
> I disagree :). Too many times, a mile and a half of quoted text starts
> out the message. I don't care to take the time to scroll down, but
> prefer to see the meat of what is being said at the top. It is
> especially annoying when the subject line doesn't reflect the message
> content ... which is most of the time.
>
> Hans Franke wrote:
> >
> > > > Unfortunately, I don't think Winston said anything
> > > > about the inability to format e-mail responses
> > > > in conventional style, so we're stuck. "see below, plz."
> > > > now induces an immediate "CTRL/D" from my left hand.
> >
> > > Okay, so what is the *preferred* method of replying to classiccmp posts?
> > > Reply at top? Replay at bottom? Or, embedded comments interspersed
> > > throughout the replied-to post? I prefer the latter, more
conversational
> > > style . . .
> >
> > I absolutly agree. Especialy with series of replys llike
> > we have the embedded style helps a lot. I considere the
> > 'Top-Style' as rude.
> >
> > Gruss
> > H.
> >
> > --
> > VCF Europa 3.0 am 27./28. April 2002 in Muenchen
> > http://www.vcfe.org/
>
>
Received on Tue Apr 16 2002 - 12:17:50 BST