[Gambas-user] Top posting

[Rolf-Werner Eilert]

Am 11.03.2015 06:54, schrieb richard terry:
> On 11/03/15 14:37, Kevin Fishburne wrote:
>> On 03/10/2015 07:37 PM, richard terry wrote:
>>> Personally I like top-posting, some lists I"m on use it. I find it
>>> easier to find out the last thing said rather than having to scroll down
>>> to the bottom of a long post. If the mail headers are up in the top
>>> pain, and the text in the bottom pain its easy to just scroll down the
>>> mail without having to constantly jump to the bottom pane to go down to
>>> the bottom.
>> Oh, you really stepped in it now, Richard. Did someone finally port
>> Outlook Express to Linux? I'm kidding, of course. To each their own, but
>> threads get crazy when top and bottom posting are mixed. It starts to
>> appear random after a while. We need an entirely new mail protocol that
>> fixes the top/bottom-posting issue AND spam. Because why not?
>>
> Ok, a bottom post.
>
>    Haven’t used  Windows on the desktop for nearly many many yrs, and
> never used outlook!!!!
>
> I guess if the list wants bottom post, I"ll bottom post, after all
> though I read the stuff every day I don't post much, but don't want to
> inconvenience people.
>
> regards
>
> Richard
>
>

For someone who comes later and has to find the clue to the thread, it's 
easier to follow with bottom posts. In all the company environments I 
know, however, top posts are made simply because both parties usually 
are informed about the topic and just want to read what the other side 
has written. Keeping the old posts is for documentary reasons - and 
sometimes laziness - only.

For my own part, I prefer top posts when it has to be quick, but as I 
have learned mailing lists back in the time of Fidonet, I would prefer 
cutting everything of the old post(s) except the really relevant parts 
and inserting my own texts between.

If someone introduced a new mail text protocol, this might be done with 
tags similar to html. This would leave the text readable in text-only 
mail clients or for the case something gets garbled. Newer programs 
could handle the tags and make it up like the message clients on 
smartphones do.

For instance, we could use a simple %DATETIME% tag for a number of 
lines, and a #DATETIME# closing tag. Or would <DATETIME> </DATETIME> be 
better? Maybe one could even have a quoting system like that of the 
popular forums, including the name of the author etc. The mail client 
would then figure out which block of text belongs where, and the user 
could choose for top or bottom quote or whatever is preferred.

Should we start a project in Gambas? :)

Rolf