Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 07:01:13 08/11/99
It seems that a reply style has evolved on CCC where folks quote pages of earlier messages in order to add a sentence or two at the bottom, such as "Good point," or some such. Since we're dealing here with HTML documents, i.e. the hypertext, where link already exists into the previous message, there is no reason to quote almost anything, much less to quote the entire messages (which themselves may be several levels of quoted entire messages). The only reason one may quote a brief segment would be to indicate to which item from the earlier post one is responding. A short fragment identifying such place ought to be enough. The message processing script could even strip off the quoted items and convert them into a targetted link which brings up the place in the earlier message to which the resonse is directed. Another helpful step would be to post the guidelines, with a brief reminder about the most frequent bad habits at the top of the posting form. Even better step would be to remove entirely the "Post with quoting" option, which stimulates the wasteful and unhelpful re-copying. That kind of option may have been useful on some old usenet access system, where looking at the past messages would require a much larger effort than clicking the mouse at the link. In the present situation, by virtue of promoting the endless re-re-re... quoting, it only wastes time of the readers while browsing, as well as the space and the download time of the archives.
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Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
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