syntax oddities

[Richard Damon]

On 5/18/18 10:38 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, May 19, 2018 at 12:30 AM, Richard Damon
> <Richard at damon-family.org> wrote:
>> I would divide the two communities/cultures differently. Top Posting is
>> reasonable, effective and common in an environment where the primary
>> recipients of the message can be assumed to have read, and likely
>> remembered, the previous messages, and they are included mostly as a
>> quick memory aid to remember WHICH conversation this message pertains
>> with, or to a lessor extent, to help bring someone new to the
>> conversation up to speed or if the message is pulled up out of an
>> archive. Here the real focus is on the new content and the past record
>> is mostly a 'foot note' (which is expected to be at the end). Since
>> people tend to ignore the quoted material, if often ends up unedited and
>> gets long (this actual is useful when someone new gets added to the
>> email chain)
> If people are generally going to ignore the quoted content, why have
> it at all? Why not just post context-free messages that have a
> reference to the rest of the conversation?
Because, as I said, there are occational and lesser usages for the
quoted material, it just isn't primary. It is a 'foot note'
>
> The ONLY way that the unedited quoted material is useful to someone
> joining the email chain is if EVERY message is a response to the
> single most recent message, and thus carries the entire conversation.
> Otherwise, your email thread will branch and fork, and someone cc'd in
> on a message will see only part of the thread, making it worse than
> useless. The way you describe things, email is the wrong tool for the
> job, and you should be using a message board of some sort.
>
> So, no, top posting still isn't "reasonable, effective, and common" in
> any environment. It might be common, but that's all.
>
> ChrisA

If the thread forks, and someone is brought into one of the forks to
help with an issue brought up in THAT fork, then the context will
generally be sufficient for that.

Normally people WILL reply to the latest message in the chain (and in
fact Outlook will warn you if you are not doing that). The main reason
people don't reply to the most recent message is that several people
replied nearly simultaneously, and yes the  other comments not in the
message people carry forward will get lost from the history. But for
that to happen you need multiple active participants in the conversation
which starts to strays away from the model.

-- 
Richard Damon