Re: Discussion list guidelines

> 1) Keep the discussions friendly. Use (grin) and (smile) in
>    your email if tone could be mistaken. Don't use :-) .

Why are smiley bad ?

For one thing they're international.

MS Word recognizes some basic smileys on the fly (even changes them in
some dingbat), why wouldn't a smart screen reader do the same ?

Maybe we need to use the same TODAY/NEW dichotomy we use in Markup
guidelines ? 

For the future, we could define a list of <10 basic smileys whose
usage would be OK and semantics well defined.

Like :-) for "smile", ;-) for "complice smile", :-| for "tough life", :-( for
"unhappy". etc. 

> 5) If new text is inserted within the body of the Old message,
>     mark all new text with author's initials followed by two
>     colons (e.g   GV::  or  GK:: )    At the end put:  End GV.

First I think it should mention that the pieces of the old message,
when copied in, should be "greaterized" one level more, that is, "> "
added in column one.

Now, the algorithm to find original text is not that difficult:
it starts in column one and is not a >.

I understand it's not in the current set of capabilities of the
average email/screen-reader combination (to search for something that
is not something), but it's easy enough that some procmail (unix)
filter that adds begin and end marker around original text could be
implemented in no time.

So, again, it's a matter of the tool used, the information is there.

Sure, adding DD:: adds some info, but as it both requires more work
byt the author and somehow clutters the visual for sighted user, it's
in the "accessibility OR else" design that I don't really like.

Note that if we're only adding marker like DD:: at the beginning (and
the end) of original text sections, we're asking people to insert the
whole section when answering (or they lose the context).

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 1997 10:51:55 UTC