Re: [tlug] Quoting...yet again

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-12-22 06:39 +0000 (Mon), Godwin Stewart wrote:

> I do find it sad that, even here, some people are not thinking about what
> they're doing. With all the evidence that there's really no advantage to
> doing so, there are still some people posting HTML to the TLUG mailing list.
> Why? Do they not even know thay're doing it? Or don't they care?

I think that there are two sides to this. One is that people do consider
this a different communications medium: they feel that they don't have
to take the care they do if they were, for example, writing an essay.
I'm certainly one of those; I am often able to bash out a 500-1000 word
tlug post in not much more than an hour and just send it, after only one
final editing pass; I'd never consider that for an essay to be published
in the New York Times. :-)

Another is just lack of consideration for readers, or lack of
understanding that you should have consideration. Spending five minutes
to save the reader 10 seconds doesn't seem like a good trade-off, unless
you both realize that 150 people are going to read your post, and you
care to optimize the commons rather than your own personal time.

The last, and I'd guess most frequent, is just an insensitivity to
style. I notice this in a lot of writing and code for that matter,
getting it to the point of "it somehow works" is considered fine, and
many people don't notice any difference after that. It's similar to
someone who can't tell, when a guitar is being played, whether it's more
or less in tune or exactly in tune. I don't know how to fix that.

> Do they not even think that there are a whole bunch of people here -
> the very people they look up to for help - who are using console-based
> mail clients and who are going to have to reconstitute the bastardised
> plain text part or decipher the HTML?

All of what I said above aside, the reconstitution is automatic for
those of us using pine, and after a wee bit of configuration, the same
goes for mutt. So this particular thing doesn't bother me much; if
there's a text alternative to the HTML I'll see that, if there isn't, I
may still not notice that the e-mail happened to be HTML.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com