Subject: Re: Reverse?

From: [email-masked] (Daniel D. Todd)
Date: Wed, 11 May 1994 15:28:08 -0700

At 05:36 PM 5/11/94, Adam J Weitzman wrote:
>On Wed, 11 May 1994, Terry Gray wrote:

>> As with Index sorting, the question of what style of Reply is "correct" is
>> *highly* subjective,
>
>Of course. But I would like a history lesson anyways, as up until I was
>introduced to the Pine world, all of my communications (both from me and
>to me) read the "old-style" way. The name implies that *it* was the
>default once, and since then it has been changed to what it is now. I'm
>just curious.
I prefer the "old style" too.  I think the advent of the "new style" can be attributed to two things. 
1) some people tend to over quote.
2) some people tend to quote out of context.

With 'new style" reply you can leave the whole message in your reply without having to worry about pageing through 4 pages to get to the answer.  This allows people to get to the meat of a message that is over quoted. It also prevents out of context quoting.  however it is quite annoying that many people don't bother to even delete the sig from quoted material.  It can also be very difficult to follow point by point arguments in "new style" replys.

cheers,
Dan

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 1994 16:15:29 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 11 May 1994, Daniel D. Todd wrote:

> With 'new style" reply you can leave the whole message in your reply
> without having to worry about pageing through 4 pages to get to the
> answer.  This allows people to get to the meat of a message that is over
> quoted. It also prevents out of context quoting.  

Over-quoting is also subjective, and depends upon the business 
environment you operate in... sometimes a full transcript is desirable, 
sometimes minimalist quoting is desirable.

> however it is quite annoying that many people don't bother to even delete
> the sig from quoted material. 

There is also a third bullet for your list:  3) some people tend to have 
overly long signatures...

> It can also be very difficult to follow point by point arguments in "new
> style" replys. 

This is true with either policy. I've always assumed that point-by-point 
responses should be interspersed with the original text --so it doesn't 
matter what the default cursor and sig location is in those cases.  
(Assuming that the user has figured out how to use Pico...)

OK, everybody go back to work now :)

-teg