Re: [Pan-users] Reading an HTML posting when using 'old' Pan

[Rui Maciel]

On 03/23/2012 01:29 PM, Ron Johnson wrote:
> All this self-righteous moralizing

This problem has absolutely nothing to do with self-righteousness or 
morals.  It's simply and clearly an issue regarding effective and 
efficient ways to handle written communication, nothing more, nothing 
less.  Let's not confuse or dramatize things.


> does not change the fact that the
> *vast* majority of people (especially in offices) use Outlook, and
> top-post and get by just fine.

Outlook does not enforce top-posting.  The cursor in the text edit box 
may be placed by default at the start of the text, but that doesn't 
force anyone to mindlessly start to write from there.  Outlook users are 
still free and quite able to format their message as they see fit.


> Hell, even I've been using Outlook for 12+ years at work, top-posting
> the whole time.

That's more than enough time to learn how to properly write an email.


> YES, a stunning amount of cruft builds up at the bottom
> of emails

That's an entirely different problem, which is caused by a user's 
inability to trim the message.  It equally affects the top-posting, 
bottom-posting and interleaved style.


> but amazingly communication succeeds and pretty well at that.

People also succeed in communicating even when using a heavy load of 
grammar and spelling errors, but that fails to support the idea that 
insisting on using grammar and spelling errors is somehow an acceptable 
practice.

The fact is that top-posting needlessly makes it harder to both keep 
track of a conversation and to reply to relevant parts.  Top-posting may 
be adequate in some cases, such as verbatim forwarding an email.  Other 
than this very specific application it fails to be even adequate, as it 
makes it needlessly complicated to lead an exchange of ideas.


Rui Maciel