The downhill steamroller race

[hirez]

Backwards talk don't. Like Yoda all sound will we. Reign will confusion.
Fall from the skies fire and brimstone... Oh bollocks, I can't be bothered
anymore...

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

See? It's an internet standard and everything.

Yer average western-European punter reads left-to-right and down the page,
which (duh) is the way to make an email readable for the majority if
there's quoting in there that you'm replying to.

"But my reply's off the bottom of the page!" you may cry.

Well, then. Maybe you've got too much quoted text...

Marketroids, of course, are different. When they go to the special hospital
to have their brains removed and replaced with clockwork mice, they unplug
their eyeballs and put them back in the wrong way up. That's why those
sorts of people prefer top-posting: They *have* to read backwards and
upside down or the clockwork mouse explodes in a shower of weeny
sprockets.

In the days of letterpress, they'd be able to find employment in the many
printing-works that were to be found up and down the country. The more
artistic would be able to indulge their design whims on slightly racy
posters for the village fete, or handbills, letterheadings, visiting cards,
wedding invitations and the like.

Of course, the coming of the Macintosh and laser-printing spelled the end
(or 'dne eht' for printworkers) for that trade, so they were forced out
onto the streets and had to find work amongst the normal people.

So poor netiquette is pretty much the fault of Steve Jobs and the rest of
the one-button-mouse-wallahs. I hope you're proud of yourselves.

Comments

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

Mail.app uses nice proper inline quotation out of the box, ayethankyouverymuch. :-P

I blame Exchange: you see, there's an upper storage limit of 16Gb for the main database (unless you shell out $SILLY_MONEY for the coffee-making version that lets you make a pile of 16Gb databases.) So it's in the interest of the manufacturer to make each mail item as large as possible. Hence the highly-useful technologies of HTML, rich text, executable scripts and binaries, embedded images &c &c.

There's something to be said for processing data items in queue rather than a gaudily-coloured and neverending stack.

[redcountess]

But it does default to rtf rather than plain text. Still, I was quite impressed with it, especially its junk controls.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, I was saying to a student only today, they're RFCs and not laws... though in this case we might want to press for a change of status.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Well, ye-es.

I think it works like this:

For sensible hackish chaps (and chapesses, obviously) who manage to do the right thing naturally, they're helpful guidelines.

For tedious jobsworths the're the Bloody Law. The sorts who'll exploit an ambiguity to prove a point. The sort of people who go 'Well that's not what it says on the card' when playing Triv and end up being force-fed the stupid wee pie-things.

[steer.livejournal.com]

he sort of people who go 'Well that's not what it says on the card' when playing Triv

Ah... my little sis was a great one for "No, the answer is 'Dallas comma Texas fullstop'."

[redcountess]

*ahem* On uk.comp.sys.mac, netiquette, including quoting, snipping and posting below is all observed, although quite a few regulars tend to ramble and post off topic :-) I need an Apple icon :-)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I daresay.

However, the one-button mob did pretty much make letterpress obsolete and thus I forgot how to read backwards and upside-down.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

It's fucking Outlook that's to blame. And Corporate "culture"...

As to macs, I find it delightful that they now come pre-installed with vi, possibly the most aggressively modal program ever written. And quite right too.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

I agree with the sentiment, but, I work for an email company, I send, like, ten billion squillion emails a day. I used to care, but now I just hit reply, write whatever I need to say, and accept whatever default positioning and formatting the company-installed program does.

I still insist on bottom-posting replies to mailing lists (and recontextualising the replies of top-posters in the process), but for everyday work... whatever's the default.