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

[Richard Gaskin]

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?

Being a bit of a curmudgeon myself (after all, I've earned the honor of 
having food thrown at me during a RevLive conference session on code 
style <g>), I find it fascinating that a matter of etiquette found its 
way into an RFC.

Social conventions, whether email or others, change over time.

Once upon a time Henry Watson Fowler (author of the esteemed, and later 
sadly watered-down, Dictionary of Modern English Usage) would have had 
fits had he heard the word "irregardless", having devoted a section in 
his book under "L" for "Love of the Long Word", and given that 
"irregardless" came into popular usage largely from its frequent use by 
the fictional Archie Bunker.

But today "irregardless" is in the OED.

Similarly, it was once well respected that of course you would only drop 
by your friend's house on their established visiting day, and on any 
other you would expect only to leave your card with the butler for a 
future appointment.

Few of my friends have a visiting day, and none have a butler.

And so it goes.

When the RFC was written, email was a luxury enjoyed by a relative few. 
  We didn't have our magazines filled with articles on how to manage an 
overflowing In Box and other side-effects of information overload, 
because few had email at all, the Web hadn't been invented, and none of 
us carried access to the entire world around in our pocket.

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.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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