Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 22:53 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Better tools for kernel developers by neilbrown
Parent article: Better tools for kernel developers

How easy is it to enable? Are there simple instructions I can point someone to? "Please do *this* whenever you reply to me"

I was able to find these instructions on Microsoft's website, though these are how to set the default rather than how to do it for an individual message.

Maybe that simple fact is a big flaw in Outlock. There is little point having functionality that people cannot find and don't even know to look for.

Older, plain text email clients defaulted to prefixing every line with a quote character because that was the only practical way of quoting a message. When newer clients started to support fancier formatting, that approach didn't work the same, so they used HTML-type quoting. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have come up with an easy way to intersperse quotes and replies, so people defaulted to top posting. That said, even with old-fashioned plain text quoting, there were plenty of people who top posted because it was faster than quote/reply formatting.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 8, 2020 0:19 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> though these are how to set the default rather than how to do it for an individual message.

Thanks for the link. I was afraid it might only be settable globally. This related directly to my point below...

> That said, even with old-fashioned plain text quoting, there were plenty of people who top posted because it was faster than quote/reply formatting.

That's true and it doesn't bother me at all - providing they manage to communicate clearly.
I really don't care about the format, but I would like people to think about the message that they want to send, and then to create the message accordingly.
This means they need the tools available to create a useful message. Sometimes top-posting is a perfectly good way to send a message, sometimes interleaving is best. In the cases that I can think of that particularly bothered me, my correspondent clearly *was* trying to communicate usefully, but were impeded by their tool.
Having the tools available needs them available on a message-by-message basis, not as a global setting.

Having quote-with-prefix/quote-without-prefix/don't-quote as a global setting is a bit like having reply-to-sender/reply-to-all/forward be a global setting. (or html/plain-text being a global setting!!!)

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Mar 3, 2020 17:09 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

If you set it to "prefix each line", the precise behaviour depends on whether the original message is plain text or HTML, so you don't get the > prefixing for HTML emails (instead you get a coloured border on the side, which is inoffensive and actually quite useful). It's not quite as good as if it let you set this per message, but in practice the way it works seems basically sane and actually a fairly reasonable approach.

Also, when replying to a plain text email, it defaults to plain text so you don't need to change anything.

I don't really want to defend Outlook too much since I kind of hate it, mostly for reasons not covered in this thread, but in this particular way I think its reputation is a bit unfair.