RE: [WAI-IG] Top posting. An attempted summary

On 1 Mar 2004, at 13:12, David.Pawson@rnib.org.uk wrote:
> <poehlman> said:
>>  I'm not sure what a line based email client is

> OK, my jargon. Any tool that restricts a user in whatever way, to 
> getting content one line at a time.  Others might be a soft braille 
> display, AT that presents one line at a time, A *nix tool that is 
> command line driven etc.

For the record, most command line tools these days are quite capable 
of providing an interactive page based display. So being command line 
driven doesn't imply that it is a line based tool (although I could 
configure mutt[1] to use ed[2] if I really wanted to).

Mutt does, however, know how to cope with the traditional quoting 
style (interleaved with quote levels indicated by greater than signs) 
very nicely. It colour codes each level of quoting, allows the user to 
skip past the current block of quoted text by typing S and to toggle 
quoted text on and off with T. These features do, of course, depend on 
people sticking to the usual style of quoting and are useless when 
dealing with top posting or id tagged messages.

A gratuitous screenshot of mutt can be found (for a short while) at
<http://dorward.me.uk/tmp/mutt.jpeg>. It features colour coded quoted
material and quite large font sizes (yes, I am aware that some people
require much larger font sizes).

Another part of this thread was discussing the difficulty of line 
lengths and quoted material, especially as regards to reflowing it. My 
editor (mutt calls a user configurable editor rather then depending on 
any built in functionality), emacs, is quite capable of reflowing 
quoted text and maintaining the prefixing of each line with a greater 
than sign without sprinkling the inner content with them.

In short - when presented with standard quoting techniques, good tools 
can handle themselves well. This includes email software with an aural
output - if such software doesn't exist, then it is at least technically
possible to write (and something I might have considered looking into
for my third year project at university had I thought of it at the time.
(Hint to anyone who follows this list and happens to be in that
situation <grin>)).

[1] Rather nice command line email client
[2] line EDitor

Received on Tuesday, 2 March 2004 17:40:37 UTC