Bottom posting v top posting

[David Young]

You can come back out from under your desk, now.  I want to hide under
there.  A couple thoughts:

Sometimes I scroll through email conversations on the iPhone---I use
the "next message" button as a last resort.  I find that if quotes
are not trimmed, then it does not matter whether they are at the top
or the bottom of an email: there is a lot to scroll through.  So when
other iPhone users object to replying under a trimmed reply, I am not
sympathetic.

Do you remember Google Wave?  It's been a long time since I watched a
demo, but ISTR you could click where you wanted to insert a reply and
start typing, thus creating an "inline" reply.  It looked like they had
thought about the role of quotation in email and made a very thoughtful
design.

It seems to me that an email client should smooth over the differences
between top- and bottom-posting and even merge mails from a thread
into an overview that suppresses the text duplicated by quotations.  I
once set out to prototype such a view, but I wasn't too happy with the
way text marched toward the right margin, so I would take a different
approach, today.  Here is the conversation I produced an overview for,

  http://sigonella.whitecoralislands.com/~dyoung/summary/link-sets.discuss

and here is the overview,

  http://sigonella.whitecoralislands.com/~dyoung/summary/summary.html .

If you insist on ASCII art, here is the same overview in text,

  http://sigonella.whitecoralislands.com/~dyoung/summary/link-sets.discussion-summary

Dave

-- 
David Young
dyoung at pobox.com    Urbana, IL    (217) 721-9981