Top posting

[Jamon Camisso]

On 28/05/13 12:08 PM, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
> It is with the professional set. You can send and receive it on Outlook,
> Blackberry, iPhone, OS X Mail (if you're a “creative”) or Android (if
> you're an engineer). That's 999‰ of the business ecosystem.

This list is distinctly *not* driven by the business ecosystem, or the
legal, or the xyz system. It is a technical mailing list for Linux based
discussions, for and by people who ought to know enough to adhere to a
common standard of discourse. After all that's what computers and
operating systems are, standardized computational tools, from CPU
architectures, memory allocation best practices, up to UTF8 email
messages and beyond.

HTML email, and top-posting on this list are terrible scourges, that
should be dealt with in a most severe manner the likes of which Lennart
has only hinted at in passing.

/dev/null is too warm and inviting a place for such emails :p

Why such a strident opinion you might ask? Simply put, HTML email and
not taking a moment to reply in-line or bottom post encourages laziness.
Most insidious is that the default message composition format and
behaviour in many clients encourages this laziness.

Granted, like any tool, email can (and should be!) be used by anyone in
any manner that they see fit. However, within the context of this list,
one should use the tool in a manner that reflects an understanding of
the context within which a detail oriented discussion is taking place,
and the intended audience of said discussion.

To draw upon McLuhan: if the medium is the message (HTML being the
medium for the contents of an email), then the message as I see it on a
regular basis consists of mostly badly formed syntactic messes of
irrelevant divs, fonts and formatting, the sheer bulk of which largely
outweigh the actual meaningful content of said message. Signatures are
infinitely worse for the value that they impart to a discussion and they
deserve their own special place in email hell.

Given the subject of this list is highly technical at times, it makes
sense to be clear and technical with one's formatting, language, and in
using meaningful structures to organize one's ideas. This approach is
useful in that it maintains some semblance of logical coherence across
multiple highly technical posts (at times), and also maps nicely onto
threaded email clients that reflect said structure on a macro-level.

I'll be the first to admit that I never live up to that standard of
communication on this list, or any other. But it doesn't mean that I
ought to be lazy and not try.

> Don't forget Postel's Law, as enshrined in RFC1122: “Be liberal in what
> you accept, and conservative in what you send”.

A key tenant of all good writing is knowing one's audience. Postel's Law
makes for a useful comparison that maps nicely to this discussion:

Admitting the premise that we ought to be liberal in what we choose to
accept, say on this list a free flowing exchange of ideas between
interested parties; it follows that in participating in said exchange we
ought to be conservative in the manner in which we choose to express our
thoughts, for the aforementioned reasons of maintaining technical
clarity, logical coherence, and consideration of others.

Cheers, Jamon
--
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