[Scottish] Re: News Letter April 08

[John Seago]

On Friday 11 April 2008 12:15:07 Kyle Gordon <kyle at lodge.glasgownet.com> 
wrote: 
>
> Top posting worked just fine in that context due to the reply not
> addressing any part of the post in particular.
>
To criticise the volume of the original post, (as posted in the digest), and 
then to include the original post in its entirety, seems somewhat perverse, 
would you not agree? Perhaps the suggestion that "it might be an idea to have 
a digest / list of contents at the  top of such mail-outs", would have 
sufficed.
>
> The part that you quote isn't even in the email that Andrew replied to, and
> is only present in the digest version that you subscribe to.
>
Here is the material written by Andrew Back in the Email to the Scottish list  
>
> I can only speak for myself here, but must say that whilst curious as to 
> what you guys had organised, I started to lose the will to live as I paged 
> down. So it might be an idea to have a digest / list of contents at the 
> top of such mail-outs. So that folks can quickly see if there is 
> anything that is of interest to them and then read on if so. The 
> voluminous monolithic blocks of text approach I find a bit overbearing!
>
I quoted only the last sentence of the paragraph, I cannot see any difference 
between the post, (threaded), to the Scottish list, and the post to the 
Digest of the Scottish list. Might it be that you are referring to the 
subject line?

The point remains that complaints that "voluminous monolithic blocks of text" 
are found to be overbearing, and that they further cause a loss of will to 
live, lose their impact when made above, "voluminous monolithic blocks of 
text". Or could it be that Andrew Back, whilst intending to edit the material 
he was replying to, forgot to do so? Mayhap he will enlighten us. As to the 
differences between the threaded list and the digest, one takes that that 
meets ones needs. 

Whilst the following apply more to usenet  
http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanb/documents/quotingguide.html
they might perhaps be considered as examples of 'good practice' as editing 
quoted material does prevent successive posts getting longer and longer when 
the entirety of each previous post is quoted, would you not agree? 
  
-- 
John Seago
GNU/Linux Registered User No. #219566 http://counter.li.org/
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