[OT][[TL/DR] 6.6 RC2 Release

[Peter M. Brigham]

On Mar 21, 2014, at 11:20 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Bob Sneidar wrote:
> 
> > I think that what you must mean by, “wrong” is, “presently
> > inconvenient to me”, but as Richmond pointed out, what is
> > inconvenient for one may be standard operating procedure for
> > another. I don’t want to belabor the point, but if some committee
> > of persons sat around a table and actually wrote an RFC about how
> > quoted text MUST be top down in an email or else it was just “wrong”,
> > then I am inclined to disregard their notions, and symbolically give
> > them the raspberry! Has anyone actually explained to these people
> > that they can actually have a LIFE?
> 
>  <snip>
> 
> So while there is a certain err-on-the-side-of-completeness charm to quoting an entire, sometimes lengthy, email before replying to a small part of it, it seems the result of an organic evolution of our information-grazing habits to expect that the original message be trimmed to the relevant portion.
> 
> That said, it's merely a matter of taste, and perhaps usability, and neither trimming nor quoting in full is law.
> 
> It benefits the respondent to trim because it helps ensure the response will be read.
> 
> But as with my long off-topic posts here, the world won't stop if a message is overlooked because it's TL/DR.
> 
> It only matters to the writer who wants it to be read.
> 
>  <snip>

Guidelines are guidelines. Many times they make a good deal of sense, but they're just a tool, and the goal is to foster smooth communication. How you say things should always be in the service of getting your point across. So sometimes top quoting makes sense, sometimes bottom quoting, and sometimes interrupting the quote with responses to each point is the way to go. No algorithm will work all the time, and human judgment based on context is ultimately the thing that works best.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig