Re: Posting Guidelines: Top or bottom posting

I am very happy with the idea of leaving that deliberately open. Lets record that decision however, so we don't have people telling others how they should  be writing emails to the list as that's common in W3C groups.

--tobie

Sent from my phone

On Oct 17, 2012, at 20:38, "Chris Mills" <cmills@opera.com> wrote:

> From my experience, strict posting guidelines tend to build more walls than they break down, and don't work that effectively unless it's a close knit group that gets on board with them pretty well. We've got a large, loose group to manage, so not ideal.
> 
> They also don't really make that much difference, unless you are having lots of long involved discussions with big threads.
> we should have some guidelines, but not be too aggressive with people who don't stick to them. Instead, as long as the core group follows the guidelines and sets a good example, we can get a number of people on board with them, without too much hassle and bad feeling.
> 
> Chris Mills
> Open standards evangelist and dev.opera.com editor, Opera Software
> Co-chair, web education community group, W3C
> Author of "Practical CSS3: Develop and Design" (http://my.opera.com/chrismills/blog/2012/07/12/practical-css3-my-book-is-finally-published)
> 
> * Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
> * Learn about the latest open standards technologies and techniques: http://dev.opera.com
> * Contribute to web education: http://www.w3.org/community/webed/
> 
> On 17 Oct 2012, at 19:27, "Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH)" <Michael.Champion@microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
>> Agree that no consensus is likely.  We might be able to usefully agree on some guidelines such as:
>> - If you are top posting, quote enough of the content below so that the typical reader doesn’t have to read the whole thread bottom up.
>> - If you are interleaving, remove the irrelevant content and don’t bury the substance of your comment so deeply that it’s hard to find.
>> - Overall, respect the fact that people will be reading your message on a variety of devices, so don’t make people have to scroll too far up or down to get to or understand your point.
>> - As Orwell famously put it “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> From: Paul Irish [mailto:paul.irish@gmail.com] 
>> Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:42 AM
>> To: Doug Schepers
>> Cc: Tobie Langel; public-webplatform@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: Posting Guidelines: Top or bottom posting
>> 
>> I'd prefer to not take a stand for the list. It's awkward and discourages participation.
>> 
>> Also I love top posting and HTML email and know folks who detest both. I don't see a useful resolution. 
>> 
>> On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:
>> Hi, Tobie-
>> 
>> 
>> On 10/17/12 12:20 PM, Tobie Langel wrote:
>> 
>> While on the subject of posting guidelines, are we going to take a stand
>> about bottom vs. top posting[1]... or leave it as an open question?
>> 
>> [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Top-posting
>> 
>> I favor inline ("interleaved") or bottom posting, with liberal trimming (remove greetings and sigs, strip out any settled points or unnecessary examples).
>> 
>> I also take care personally to make sure that my replies are "blocked off"... I leave one space after the text I'm replying to, and 2 spaces after my comments and the next quoted block.
>> 
>> 
>> However, for some kinds of response, like "+1" or any kind of polling-type information gathering ("Tuesday works for me"), top-posting is just fine. It's just not great for involved responses. (In fact, I really hate scrolling down 50 lines of quoted text just to see a "+1" or minor comment, so top-posting is better there.)
>> 
>> 
>> My 2 cents-
>> -Doug
>> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 17 October 2012 19:59:28 UTC