Re: Preloading Images and External JS File

Joshie Surber wrote:
>>>>Please quote what you are replying to.

It looks like a request to provide some sort of attribution for those
quotes is also warranted. So to mitigate:-

>>> Randy Webb wrote:
>> Joshie Surber wrote:
> Randy Webb wrote:
Joshie Surber wrote:

>>> why? if there is only one question to reply to, there is
>>> no point reminding everyone what it is... it just wastes
>>> bandwidth.

It doesn't waste bandwidth to provide a context for any reply made. It
is not often necessary (or desirable) to quote all of a post that is
being replied to. Indeed the 'correct' action is to trim quoted material
down to no more than is sufficient to provide a context for the response
given. This may, in many cases, be as little as a single sentence or
single line of code, depending on what it is that is being responded to.

>> Because most people in this group use a decent newsreader
>> rather than groups.google.com and in the process of doing
>> that they do not keep a perpetual archive of previous posts.

It is also the case that news servers only store posts for a limited
period, which older posts being dropped (either on a time-limited basis,
or when a total number of posts is exceeded, or when a total size limit
is exceeded). And as a question must precede its responses it is
entirely realistic (indeed inevitably common) that a question may have
been dropped form a news server while its responses are still available.

>> So, quoting what you are replying to - even if a single
>> question - makes it a lot simpler to follow the conversation.
>
> Well it seems to me that, given a protocol based upon
> conversation threads,

It would be more accurate to say "ephemeral conversation threads", as
long term storage and archiving were never part of the intention of
newsgroups (potentially useful as such may be in some contexts).

> a "decent newsreader" would keep these threads together
> for you, and given such, that excess quoted material just
> takes up too much space.

Nobody is proposing "excess quoted material". The requirement is to
quote only what is sufficient to provide a context for the response
given. No more, but certainly no less. The benefits in not having to
look elsewhere, and reconstruct the context of a specific response from
the entire body of a post, far exceeds harm of the potential additional
bandwidth consumption.

> <opinion type="personal" valid="true">

On the subject of communication that is one-to-many in nature the
opinion of an individual cannot outweigh the best interests of the many.

> Part of why I have discarded the four or five newsreaders that
> I have gone thru in favor of google groups is that google is
> the only one I have found that is "decent" enough to group
> threads and hide all the quoted cruft that litters usenet like
> empty beer bottles along a highway.
> </opinion>

Attempting to hide quoted material is one of the significant faults in
google's Usenet interface. It is inconvenient to continually be
expanding those quotes in order to see the context of a response, and
finding google treating closing braces in posted code as quoted material
is particularly disappointing.

But you may find it informative to consider this post. Remove all of the
quoted material and try reading my responses out of context. Does the
result make more or less sense than it would in context? Does the result
actually make any sense at all?

You should also consider the harm you do to others. Every time you post
an inappropriately formatted message you are encouraging some others to
do likewise. The simple truth is that individuals posting to this group
without regard for the conventions that apply to the formatting and
structuring of posts will find their questions being ignored by any of
the regular contributors who care. And you don't have to look very far
to observe that the majority of the potentially most useful regular
contributors to this group do care. You may not have a problem with
shooting yourself in the foot, but you should be circumspect about
encouraging others to do likewise.

Richard.



.

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