Re: [Pan-users] Reading an HTML posting when using 'old' Pan

[Duncan]

Rui Maciel posted on Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:46:08 +0000 as excerpted:

>> does not change the fact that the *vast* majority of people (especially
>> in offices) use Outlook, and top-post and get by just fine.
> 
> Outlook does not enforce top-posting.  The cursor in the text edit box
> may be placed by default at the start of the text, but that doesn't
> force anyone to mindlessly start to write from there.  Outlook users are
> still free and quite able to format their message as they see fit.

FWIW I don't know about outlook itself, but I was a beta tester for IE/OE 
4-5.5 (I installed 6 before switching to Linux but was busy getting ready 
for that switch, so didn't beta test it) and know quite a bit about it as 
a result.

I always argued that OE put the cursor at the top, NOT to encourage or 
force top posting, but rather, to encourage proper quote editing and 
inline posting.

To do that properly, you start at the top anyway, deleting extraneous 
content from the quote as you go down, so only the points you're replying 
to remain.  Then you reply to them inline, ideally such that in a 
reasonably sized window, there's never a quoted segment large enough that 
there's not a part of the inline reply visible either above or below it. 

That limits quotes to a maximum of just less than two window-fulls, such 
that a bit of the previous point's inline reply can be seen at the top of 
the first, and a bit of the current reply seen at the bottom of the 
second.  Yes, "just less than two window-fulls" *IS* an imprecise 
measure, but it's meant to be, the biggest point being that one never has 
to page-down thru pages and pages of quote to get to the reply, a 
situation which only encourages top-posting from readers tired of paging-
down.

By doing such, even if you're replying to a 400-line post like some of 
mine, unlike top-posting OR bottom posting, the context in which the 
reply is intended is always obvious, and nobody's paging down a dozen 
times to get to the reply at the bottom of a 400-line quote!

Additionally, done that way, the process of proper in-context and inline 
replies happens naturally, such that by the time the cursor gets to the 
bottom, the result is a readable post in natural contextual order. =:^)


Of course, if one is replying to an existing thread where inline posting 
hasn't been practiced, and one needs to quote more than a single layer 
deep to get the proper context, things get rather difficult, but that's 
the case regardless of where the initial cursor position is when the 
compose window opens.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman