Re: Second Normal Form help.

In article <dMny6.7777$mA.2397836_at_newsrump.sjc.telocity.net>, Lorrin Moore wrote:
>
> Unless you are responding point by point to a message, or the original
> quoted material fits within a few lines in a news reader, there is no
> reason to "top quote".

I strongly disagree. What you do not seem to be taking into account, is that it is not possible to read a thread from beginning to end in one sitting. For instance, I will read as much of a group as I have time for, then hit the "catch up" button. The next time I download news may be two or three days later, and given that I read around fifty groups, it is not possible to remember what was being said in every thread anyway. When someone such as yourself fails to quote a preceding snippet to put things in context I find it difficult to make sense of what is being said.

> Regular readers have already read the thread
> and don't need to re-read it to understand your contribution.

Context is useful even to a regular reader. Obviously it is good form to trim down what is being quoted to the minimum necessary to give enough context, but you're not arguing for that because if you were you wouldn't leave the entire quoted message at the bottom of your posting.

I have noticed that people who post in reverse order are nearly always Outlook Express users and I have to assume that there is some user interface flaw in Outlook which makes them do this. On the other hand it may simply be that the typical Outlook user is also a Usenet neophyte who does not understand the long standing culture that has developed for the benefit of everyone. Such neophytes probably believe that a one-off minor inconvenience for them when they write a message outweighs the multiple inconveniences of everyone else who reads the message. My suggestion is that such neophytes learn some humility and attempt to fit in with the culture they are trying to be a part of.

In article <Whby6.7144$mA.2120275_at_newsrump.sjc.telocity.net>, Lorrin Moore wrote:
>
> So I don't have to scroll all the way to the damned bottom just to
> read your inane response.

This is another problem I've noticed. Some neophytes who do not understand the reasons for the Usenet culture of interleaved quoting, but who nevertheless know that they are supposed to reply *after* what is said so that it reads forwards rather than backwards, seem to think that it is enough to simply place their reply at the bottom without trimming the quoted material at all. The result, as you quite rightly complain, is that you are simply scrolling to the bottom of a large wad of text in order to read the new material. What you need to understand is that the quoted text should be trimmed down to the essential points you are answering and the replies interleaved between.

Another thing you should recognise is that Usenet is archived for research purposes and if your postings do not make sense because they are written in a backwards quoting order, this makes life difficult for anyone wishing to mine Usenet for information. When you add to this the bloat caused by unthinking regurgitation of the entire untrimmed message again and again in accumulation as a conversation progresses, then you can see how it damages the ability of searchable archives to store and retrieve the relevant articles.

Usenet has worked well in these ways for as long as I've been using it (around ten years). For Outlook users to come along recently and spoil it in the way they do, is quite wrong. They should be more socially conscious and stop behaving like mindless playground bullies.

-- 
James Taylor <james (at) oakseed demon co uk>
Based in Hammersmith, London, UK.
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