This isn't really Cygwin-related but I wonder if the battle against TOFU is well and truly lost. Very few people that I know use it. It's not even on anyone's radar as something that should be done. Many email readers default to it. At NetApp, it's basically the wild west when it comes to quoting style. Some people use the tried-and-true, "just forward it back along with email headers". Some people invent their own style, like bracketing replies with their name. No one puts the quotes first and their replies after and hardly anyone (besides me) ever trims anything. Just needed to vent. Not using TOFU makes a lot of sense but I think the battle is over. cgf
Christopher Faylor wrote: > This isn't really Cygwin-related but I wonder if the battle against TOFU is > well and truly lost. Very few people that I know use it. It's not even on > anyone's radar as something that should be done. Many email readers default > to it. Personally, I love the fact that the Cygwin list still (attempts to) enforce interleaving. It feels like the last bastion of readability and common sense over laziness. > At NetApp, it's basically the wild west when it comes to quoting style. Some > people use the tried-and-true, "just forward it back along with email > headers". Which is more-or-less fine for things that aren't going to go on a crawlable website, and a nightmare for things that are. > Some people invent their own style, like bracketing replies with their name. That's a standard Microsoft Outlook option. You can fairly easily set it up to add those brackets automatically when you add a comment interleaved in a reply. Not sure if Microsoft came up with the idea, but I strongly suspect that's one of the reasons it caught on so. (I have to use Outlook, but I have a practiced technique involving Cygwin vim and /dev/clipboard for writing nicely quoted emails.) > No one puts the quotes first and their replies after and hardly anyone > (besides me) ever trims anything. It's still the case that bottom-posting is normal for each message in threading clients. If you look at Gmail or Facebook, for example, they both put the more recent replies below the older, and they both surpress the context (in Gmail, there's a button to expand the quoted context; Facebook just doesn't include it in replies at all, since it's always included the full context of previous messages). I think some form of quoting is still useful when you need to reply to individual points, but I think that's fairly rare. Now increasing numbers of people use clients that thread conversations, I suspect we're just going to see folk stopping quoting entirely except when they explicitly want to reply separately to separate points.
On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> Just needed to vent. Not using TOFU makes a lot of sense but I think
> the battle is over.
The other day I inadvertently bottom-posted to a relatively small
mailing list of (mostly non-tech) friends. One (of the tech variety)
responded so:
"David, It's over. We lost. The world settled on doing it the wrong
way. You did it the wrong way with us, for a decade. Remember? When
you reply-bottom now, all you do is mess up the threading.
Condolences,
Andrew"
He's probably right.
-David
On Fri, Nov 02, 2012 at 04:30:51PM -0400, David Eisner wrote:
>On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>Just needed to vent. Not using TOFU makes a lot of sense but I think
>>the battle is over.
>
>
>The other day I inadvertently bottom-posted to a relatively small
>mailing list of (mostly non-tech) friends. One (of the tech variety)
>responded so:
>
>"David, It's over. We lost. The world settled on doing it the wrong
>way. You did it the wrong way with us, for a decade. Remember? When
>you reply-bottom now, all you do is mess up the threading.
>
>Condolences, Andrew"
>
>He's probably right.
Rather depressing. :-)
Occasionally, I take time to laboriously correct the threading and
respond on the bottom but that's pretty silly.
I think most of the time when I do bottom posting people wonder why in
the world I'm doing that.
cgf