[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI roadmap (for production)

[David Brodbeck]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Rich Teer <rich at richjen.com> wrote:

> This conversation reminds me of this old chestnut:
>
> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> A: Top-posting.
> Q: What's the most annoying thing on Usenet and in email?
>
> It's as true today as it has always been.
>

As with many things, I've found over the years that it depends on the
audience.  A lot of people in workplace environments don't have time to
carefully do a scavenger hunt through a long post to find the buried
inlined comments, and will ignore anything not at the top.  On the other
hand, for responding to a detailed point-by-point discussion inlining makes
sense, and it does make people slightly more likely to actually trim their
quoted text.

I think generally it's best to follow whatever pattern already exists in a
thread.  It's a mix of the two posting styles that really gets confusing.
Other than that I don't feel strongly enough about it to get ideological
about it.  I don't think there's One True Way to use email. ;)

I sometimes wonder how people using screen readers would feel.  Does the
extra context of inlining help, or is it just tiresome and confusing to
listen to multiple paragraphs of old stuff before getting to hear the new?

-- 
D. Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington
GPG key fingerprint: 0DB7 4B50 8910 DBC5 B510 79C4 3970 2BC3 2078 D875