[Python-Dev] Top-posting on this list (original) (raw)

MRAB python at mrabarnett.plus.com
Sun Oct 11 18:07:29 CEST 2009

Masklinn wrote:

On 11 Oct 2009, at 13:36 , Tarek Ziadé wrote:

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

Trimming can be a PITA if you're using a crummy MUA How so? It merely requires the ability to navigate up and down by lines, and to select and delete text. I've used some very crummy MUAs, but the ability to trim quoted text has never been absent or difficult. Are there MUAs so crummy that this is a PITA, yet still used by any significant portion of email users? You just can't do it on some mobile device mail clients. For instance Gmail's client on Android. It will just top-post and quote the whole mail for you AFAIK. I'll add the iPhone pre 3.0 Mail (also holds for the Touch): while trimming was possible, it was done using the delete key and character per character (jumping to word per word after a few seconds) because there was no selection. This made trimming long mails a fairly long-winded task already, but things were even worse due to the lack of undo: not stopping soon enough (and deleting part of the text you wanted to quote) meant you had to either re-type it manually or restart the whole operation from the start. This has thankfully been fixed (with the addition of a pretty good selection mechanism and an undo). Another iPhone mail "feature", (which hasn't been fixed and is actually just as broken in the desktop version of Mail) is that Mail is hardcoded to top-post: it's not possible to make the insertion point default to bottom the quote, it's always above it with a bunch of white-spaces for the message. Not much of an issue, but it still makes top-posting lower friction than bottom-posting or trimming. Didn't the iPhone also lack cut-and-paste?

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