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.