[Python-Dev] Top-posting on this list

[Masklinn]

On 11 Oct 2009, at 13:36 , Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au 
> > wrote:
>> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:
>>
>>> Trimming can be a PITA if you're using a crummy MUA
>>
>> How so? It merely requires the ability to navigate up and down by  
>> lines,
>> and to select and delete text. I've used some very crummy MUAs, but  
>> the
>> ability to trim quoted text has never been absent or difficult. Are
>> there MUAs so crummy that this is a PITA, yet still used by any
>> significant portion of email users?
>
> You just can't do it on some mobile device mail clients. For instance
> Gmail's client on Android.
> It will just top-post and quote the whole mail for you AFAIK.

I'll add the iPhone pre 3.0 Mail (also holds for the Touch): while  
trimming was possible, it was done using the delete key and character  
per character (jumping to word per word after a few seconds) because  
there was no selection.

This made trimming long mails a fairly long-winded task already, but  
things were even worse due to the lack of undo: not stopping soon  
enough (and deleting part of the text you wanted to quote) meant you  
had to either re-type it manually or restart the whole operation from  
the start.

This has thankfully been fixed (with the addition of a pretty good  
selection mechanism and an undo).

Another iPhone mail "feature", (which hasn't been fixed and is  
actually just as broken in the desktop version of Mail) is that Mail  
is hardcoded to top-post: it's not possible to make the insertion  
point default to bottom the quote, it's always above it with a bunch  
of white-spaces for the message. Not much of an issue, but it still  
makes top-posting lower friction than bottom-posting or trimming.