Re: My Very Strange Webhost, SBI! -- Opinions, Please

Prisoner at War wrote:
On May 26, 1:37 am, Lasse Reichstein Nielsen wrote:
<snip>
... . A quick summary on how
to quote would be:

- Quote sufficiently much to give context to your reply, so that
it is readable on its own, but not more.
- Reply below the quoted parts that your reply to.
- Correctly attribute all your quotes.
- Do not quote signatures. (Which is also why you should
correctly delimiter your signature, using a "-- " line)
<snip>
...I do not see the point of those rules/guidelines.

What you do or do not see is irrelevant; the rules exist, following them is the accepted norm, and the result works well, has worked well for many years, and will continue to work well unless the medium changes (which it will not in the foreseeable future).

You are not going to change anything by whining, and you are not proposing a better alternative.

For example, the first one you cited just
now: I've been taken to task over not quoting enough,

Quite right, you often trim too much and so fail to provide context for your responses.

for only quoting the most previous post and not quoting two
or even three posts back!

Yes, in a discussion where the post before the one that is being replied to was quoted to provide context for its response your quoting only the response deprives it of its contexts and so removes the context of your response. For example, earlier today you posted:-

| > Yes but you can ease into it.
|
| Not as a n00b! I don't even understand it!
|
| > It parses the code and analyses it instead of executing it.
|
| But...it can't be very reliable, can it...I mean, sounds like some
| artificial intelligence would be needed to really parse something
| (that is, deal with semantics, intent)....

- where both the "Yes but you can ease into it" and the "It parses the code and analyses it instead of executing it" comments had been made following quotes that made it clear what "it" was in both case. But because you removed those quotes by the time it gets to your response there is nothing left to say what these "it"s are that you are talking about. Indeed there is nothing left in your post to indicate that these two "it"s are not the same "it".

Now I say isn't that just ridiculous -- you can just
respond "yes" or "no" to a question,

You certainly can when the question appears just above the response for all to see what the answer relates to.

you needn't answer a question by including the
question in your answer ("yes, you may have a cookie")....

Have your tried giving "yes" or "no" answers out of context?

But the point of using quotes of preceding posts to provide context for their responses is to avoid the need to re-establish the context in the response. You certainly can get away with quoting less if you do provide more of the context in the responses. In the example I cited above, if you had substituted "ECMA 262" and "JSLint" for the "it"s in your response then there would have been sufficient context for a reader to know what you (and Peter) were talking about. It is just that generally it is quicker and easier to let the quoted material provide the context.

Some of these rules might initially have been created to
save bandwidth, but they also makes it possible to enter
a thread at any point and make some sense of it, and makes
reading a message easier. For a medium where there can be
thousands of readers of each message, spending a little more
time to make a message readable is better than having a
thousand readers spend two more minutes on understanding
what is written.

I'm afraid I just don't see why I'm responsible for someone
else walking in on the middle of an ongoing discussion.

Did you read the paragraph that you are responding to here? It makes two points; that rules that may once have been directed towards minimising bandwidth still have the pleasant side effect of making reading posts easier, and that in a one-to-many communication actions that ease the workload of the writer at the expense of the reader are disproportional harmful to the readers because they considerably outnumber the writer. There is nothing in there about people joining ongoing discussions.

On the other hand, you are responsible for your desire to participate in newsgroups where people will 'walk in on the middle of an ongoing discussion'. That old posts become unavailable is a common, known and expected characteristic of news servers.

Some TV shows ...

This is not a TV show.

<SNIP>
And just what is the point of a .sig, anyway??

In their extremes they are a concession to vanity. They could have been forbidden, but instead the concession that we all make to each other goes precisely so far, and no further.

If it's worthy of being snipped

Everything that does not provide context for its response is "worthy of being snipped", and so the only time a signature should be quoted is when it is the subject of a response. There is nothing special about signatures, they are just irrelevant to the vast majority of posts made in response to the messages where they appear, and the irrelevant should be trimmed out.

(I mean, golly, if including it in a response is going
to somehow confuse people),

The only sense if which an erroneously quoted signature might confuse is that it may induce a reader to look for its relevance to the response made (and probably physically look for that response (i.e. scroll down when they otherwise didn't need to)).

maybe it shouldn't exist in the first
place -- logical, no???

Maybe they shouldn't, but they do, and how they should be handled has been clearly laid out.

Remember that you are posting to comp.lang.javascript because you are interested in programming (javascript). Programming is a disciplined activity, as is creating a well-formed Usenet post. But programming requires the considerably greater discipline and so if you are incapable or unwilling to demonstrate and ability to perform the lesser discipline it should not be unexpected if you are perceived as someone for whom it would be a waste of effort to attempt to teach aspects of the greater. (That is, yes it is also a test; it is an aptitude test and it is an intelligence test.)

Richard.

.

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