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RE: Dinosaur Revolution Review
David, if it is important to address to anyone a message, then it is
important to make sure, in a public forum, others know _whom_ you are
addressing, especially with several conversations in the same thread. It
reduces confusion, and that can only increase the _quality_ of your
communication, save you only take the time to write "David Marjanovic wrote" by
hand, if necessary. Otherwise, it comes across as a justification of laziness,
and if I seem blunt on this, then I think it fairly important to qualify the
multi-party communications of various threads of a listserve (message board
forum systems have an auto-tagging element that prevents this, and is
automatic). Perhaps I misunderstand how your mailing service works, but as I
send this in plain text using a web-based response, I deliberately turn off
headers but include the full email below, which I may then choose to edit out
in response, or leave in full and reply to above, as I do here. Both allow
viewers to read my message and know _precisely_ to whom I respond. Otherwise, I
plop in a "[blank] wrote:" element, as a courtesy. It takes _seconds_. I do
apologize, however, for haranguing on this.
Cheers,
Jaime A. Headden
The Bite Stuff (site v2)
http://qilong.wordpress.com/
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a
different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race
has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or
his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion
Backs)
----------------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:45:36 +0200
> From: david.marjanovic@gmx.at
> To: dinosaur@usc.edu
> Subject: Re: Dinosaur Revolution Review
>
> Am 16.09.2011 04:35, schrieb Jaime Headden:
>
> > David, as I've said before, your manner of "quoting" leaves an
> > enourmous room for error on the part of someone not intimately
> > following any chain. If someone picked your post out for, say, a
> > pithy comment or that they like reading what you write, and see this,
> > how precisely are they to know you did not write it? It should be
> > further noted that not all reply systems use ">" to indicate nesting
> > conversations of quoting. It would help immeasurably if you just
> > added in the name of the person to whom you are replying above the
> > original quote, or (as in this post) simply include the body of the
> > otherwise short message below (which immediately includes the short
> > header for your message to which I reply.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Jaime A. Headden [rest of lengthy automatic signature snipped]
>
> Blame it on Thunderbird.
>
> First, if (and only if) the message I reply to was in plain text,
> Thunderbird does _not_ include a normal header, it only generates the
> line I didn't delete this time: in bad German; in non-English date
> format (day-month-year, not month-day-year, with the dots that mark
> ordinal numbers in German*); with the time in Central European Time,
> which makes little sense on a list full of Americans, and in non-English
> format ("14:00" rather than "2:00 pm" or the silly "1400"); with no
> indication of the sender's address if a name was given; and with no
> indication of the subject. (Strangely, a completely normal header comes
> up if the original was in HTML.) I rarely feel like rewriting the header
> all by myself, so I just drop it; _what_ I quote is, after all, more
> important than _who_ I quote anyway. I have not so far managed to find
> any settings to change so I could get Thunderbird to include a normal
> header.
>
> (...<rant>Nor, BTW, is there a setting that would format the reply in
> plain text or HTML depending on the original. I can only choose between
> having them all in HTML or all in plain text. Because I sometimes use
> HTML in private e-mails, I have chosen HTML, and that means I have to
> manually change every single message to the DML to plain text and then
> manually rewrap its lines so it gets displayed on my computer as plain
> text before I send it. But I digress.</rant>)
>
> Second, most e-mail programs use _something_ to automatically mark
> quotes, and most use >. I have no reason to add > for ornamental
> purposes or whatever, so it's a safe assumption that any vertical lines
> of > were generated by my e-mail program.
>
> Third, I'm against including the entire original message, because that
> would double or triple the length of my messages even when most of the
> original message is irrelevant to mine. A few years ago, the
> administrators even said we should stop including the entire original
> message because most text on the DML was old quotes that had long become
> useless but kept being sent back and forth.
>
> * We read dates in this format aloud as "sixteenth ninth two thousand
> eleven".