Re: Netiquette - a rational view

On 08 Jan 2006 05:45:18 GMT, jXwXeXrXmXoXnXt@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

>Ted Davis <tdavis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Top posting was popularized by Microsoft, and that alone is enough
> > reason to avoid it: MS almost *never* does anything the way the rest
> > of the world has quite properly been doing it for decades. Quoting
> > the material to which one is replying, and then following that with
> > the reply is the standard usenet practice evolved over many years and
> > many millions of messages, by millions of users. Microsoft didn't
> > invent that, so it had to come up with something stupid so it could be
> > different.
>
>LOL, that's not an unreasonable assumption, considering that MS does
>this with so many other things. But I think it has more to do with the
>advent of graphical email programs and newsreaders. In the bad old
>days, everybody used text-only newsreaders, which IMO are much more
>convenient for things like cutting and pasting. I know this, because
>I use tin, which runs on the Unix shell. It's very easy for me to cut
>and paste, and do line-by-line (or para-by-para) responses. I don't
>have a GUI newsreader, actually, but I do sometimes use Eudora when I
>need to download an attachment, and when I reply from that program, I
>find it a pain in the *** to do all that cutting and pasting. It just
>doesn't work as well when you're combining the keyboard AND the mouse.
>In tin, I use vi as my editor, and I've been using vi for so many
>years that I'm lightning fast at it and I could do the commands in my
>sleep. :) I just never got very good at doing the judicious-snip thing
>with a mouse - it's slow and tedious, and frankly, I find it much
>easier to just top-post.

vi? Well, there's no accounting for taste. (Note: there is much
significance in the fact that I typed "vi" in lower case, even at the
beginning of a sentence.)

I had a lot of resistance to GUI readers at first, but I eventually
came around ... after I discovered that there are some quite usable
programs available - as long as one avoids MS. I'm using Agent
(partly with the keyboard and partly with the mouse) under XP at the
moment, but am on the lookout for a similar program that runs under
KDE or Gnome in Linux and uses a newsrc file (I need to synchronize
two readers over a slow dialup link, and newsrc files are small).
>
>When lots of people started getting PCs and signing up for AOL and
>other services, they developed different conventions that were more
>suited to the tools they were using. I'm a throwback and I prefer the
>tools I "grew up" on. :) So it's pretty easy for me to observe all the
>old net conventions, in both email and Usenet. But as others have said,
>in work environments, where everyone's on, eg, an Outlook network,
>top-posting is the norm, and I guess that just spills over into Usenet
>posts.

I go back - in the same environment as now - to PCs as mainframe
terminals (3270 emulators installed on many machines). Top posting
for e-mail was simply unknown until Outlook was made the default
client (this followed CC-Mail, with Eudora available only by special
request (for (some) staff and faculty - students were not given a
choice) and with some grumbling from most support people (except me)).

--
T.E.D. (tdavis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
.