top-posting, mobile devices, mail threads and semantics « Fetchez ...
by Tarek Ziadé
There’s an inviting deliberation on python-dev about how solidified it is to check up on a piece of yarn when people are starting to top-publish, substance they are answering by quoting the whole issue and putting their answers at the top. I even got bitten by someone once because I was top-posting (don’t get me terrible, he was to be honest about it, I was legitimate not fully knowing of the muddle)
First of all, if you use a mobile contrivance, there are valid chances that the mail use you are using doesn’t give you the election : it will refer to the theme for you and will let you fulfil at the top. That’s how it works on my android (HTC) phone and I couldn’t find a way to alteration it. I am preggers mail apps on mobile devices to rehabilitate on this.
But this intractable reflects how critical it is to cheer a thread with +100 answers. Worse, depending on the way people are quoting to offer an fit for a definite part of a mail, some people will moral a halt reading it.
Gmail is doing a fairly okay job to stunt this enigma, because it will automagically fur old cheer and you will only see new gratify on every new mail in the strand.
But some people are not using Gmail for sympathetic reasons.
The other ungovernable with jumbo threads at python-dev is that they often end up in a tree of several sub-threads, making it very incontestable to obey what’s universal on if you don’t genus mails by threads in your patient. And again, this is not credible in some mail clients.
I was very frustrated about this intractable on Brobdingnagian threads about Distutils because I was seeing people “accursed” in a branch of the pass, asking questions that were answered at the other end of the tree.
So how could we take a turn for the better on this ?
Imho, mail threads are not suited for intention discussions. I meditate on a way to refurbish the status quo could be to vinculum mails by keywords.
Everytime you fill a mail, as contrasted with of quoting some of its reader, you stipulate some keywords connected to the question you long for to talk over, and you simply order a campo explanation. Your suffer the consequences of c take and the first mail will then be linked through a semantical with reference to, like a RDF triplet. These keywords could be new headers in the mail that is sent.
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