Re: [Evolution] A Digression on Digests

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> Nothing to do w/ corporate email or BB's.  It's much easier to reply &
> it's much easier to read a sequence of emails that are top posted.

Like hell it is - it is just overly confusing - how many times have you
seen a message that is, in its entirety, something like "yes, I think
that is correct" followed by a few thousand lines of included email
conversation without any indiction of what they are actually agreeing
with.  It's lazy and just transfers work to other people making them
continually move up and down through an email to try and work out what
you are talking about.

e.g. if I just say to the next bit of your email

================
No, I think you are wrong.

>   You
> can see what was said at the top of the email and move on.  If it's
> bottom posted you have to scroll down to the bottom.  
> Tightly trimmed & bottom posted is OK & that's what is strictly
> encouraged on this list so we should comply.

===============

What am I referring to?  Without any context you can not tell if I don't
agree with the 1st, 2nd or 3rd sentence. 

> Traditions don't always make sense forever.  Bandwidth and memory are
> cheaper than time.

It's nothing to do with tradition - it's to do with making an email
conversation make sense.

OK.  Look at it from another point of view - if you are working on a
word document, and you want to comment or change something - do you put
all the changes & comments at the top in one big lump?  No, you are
encouraged in the corporate world to use the commenting feature that
places the comments (and corrections) in the relevant place in the
document *so that it makes sense*.  Even if you aren't using a word
processor and are doing it by hand, you still make comments in the text
at the correct place.  So why can't people do that with emails? All you
are essentially doing is annotating someone elses email with your own
comments and sending it back to them - that's what a conversation is
about.

P.