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* The losing battle of TOFU
@ 2012-11-02 16:06 Christopher Faylor
  2012-11-02 16:55 ` Adam Dinwoodie
  2012-11-02 20:31 ` David Eisner
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Christopher Faylor @ 2012-11-02 16:06 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: cygwin-talk

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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

* RE: The losing battle of TOFU
  2012-11-02 16:06 The losing battle of TOFU Christopher Faylor
@ 2012-11-02 16:55 ` Adam Dinwoodie
  2012-11-02 20:31 ` David Eisner
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Adam Dinwoodie @ 2012-11-02 16:55 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Vulgar and Unprofessional Cygwin-Talk List

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.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

* Re: The losing battle of TOFU
  2012-11-02 16:06 The losing battle of TOFU Christopher Faylor
  2012-11-02 16:55 ` Adam Dinwoodie
@ 2012-11-02 20:31 ` David Eisner
  2012-11-02 20:38   ` Christopher Faylor
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 4+ messages in thread
From: David Eisner @ 2012-11-02 20:31 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: cygwin-talk

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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

* Re: The losing battle of TOFU
  2012-11-02 20:31 ` David Eisner
@ 2012-11-02 20:38   ` Christopher Faylor
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Christopher Faylor @ 2012-11-02 20:38 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Vulgar and Unprofessional Cygwin-Talk List

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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2012-11-02 20:38 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2012-11-02 16:06 The losing battle of TOFU Christopher Faylor
2012-11-02 16:55 ` Adam Dinwoodie
2012-11-02 20:31 ` David Eisner
2012-11-02 20:38   ` Christopher Faylor

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