[TriLUG] Rant: Please trim responses

[Rob Napier]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-admin at trilug.org
> [mailto:trilug-admin at trilug.org]On Behalf
> Of M. Mueller (bhu5nji)
> Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 10:17 PM
> To: trilug at trilug.org
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Rant: Please trim responses
>
> On Wednesday 20 March 2002 09:49 pm, you wrote:
>
> > is this one of those "No we are not elitist why do you ask PEON??"
> > things??
>
> perhaps a "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" thing;  throughout the day
> today I looked at things through my new pair of
> top/bottom/context/snip/no-snip glasses;   I found:
>
> a) email for business where there are agreements being made, the full trail
> with no snipping is a defense mechanism; there's no list to refer back to in
> this mode of operation, so carrying the full load everywhere helps those that
> are being brought into the discussion

This one has been a big deal for me more than once. It's very frustrating coming
midway into a conversation that has been excessively trimmed based on the
assumption that everyone knows what you're all talking about. Moreover, it's
incredibly helpful to be able to go back through the whole conversation linearly
rather than trying to wade through many layers of inline discussion. Who said
what and when kind of stuff. That's also why adding the full To and Cc lines to
the reply is very helpful. Let's you know who was in on the conversation when.


> b) on lists, snipping is an advantage because there's less
> clutter; I can see
> this working especially well when the subject matter gets dense

It particularly helps short conversations among a small number of people (like
this one). It works well when "how did we get here?" doesn't matter much. That
is true less often than engineers think.


> c) top/bottom/context: I saw no strong pattern on the several
> lists to which I'm subscribed
>
> Is the "reply at the bottom" a western cultural thing because
> we read top to bottom and left to right?  Reply at the top is a survival
> thing - get your message out in the first sentence and hope your reader stays
> with you.

It's a function of two things: where your mailer puts the cursor, and the fact
that it's a lot easier to read an ongoing conversation at the top than at the
bottom. Putting the response at the top and keeping the whole thread below most
closely matches the way formal correspondence has been done for years, where you
just wrote your part, selectively quoting (which is different from inlining).
The rest of the conversation is filed away, in order, for reference. The
advantage in email is that you don't have to copy your letter before sending it
(which people used to do), and that it's pretty cheap to send the whole
conversation back and forth in a convenient package. This means you can actually
save just the last message and get the whole conversation.

> Context replies are very good for responses to multi-topic emails.

As most people who study communication will probably atest to: multi-topic
emails are a bad thing (just like multi-topic memos). They cause several
problems:

   * It is no longer clear from the subject what the contents are
   * It complicates finding the information in the future
   * You need tricks like inlining to keep track of what you're talking about
   * If you ask two questions, people will always answer the less important

Email in the geek world is based on a history of chatting and conversation (this
particular email follows that tradition). The business world considers it an
extension of the memo, and treats it as such. This is not wrong, just because
the creators envisioned it a different way (particularly a way that was useful
for them). The overlap of these two has contributed to the reduction of clear
communication in business.

Which brings me to my next abbreviated rant (I've been thinking of writing this
up at length, but haven't really wanted to dive into it): computers and the
internet do not exist only for geeks. The rest of the world considers them tools
to get a job done. To this end, most of the geek complaints about email
ettiquite revolve around the fact that we're worried about how the system works,
while most users are worried about how to *use* it to get their work done.

Consider HTML mail. We scream about it. Why? HTML is a free, open standard. It
has readerers on every platform you could want. And it adds useful
functionality. Is it a good formatting language? No. But the usual complaints
aren't that we should be using SGML or TeX or the like. The complaints are "I
can't read it conveniently with my mailer." Then get a mailer that can. This
idea that everything has to be readable on a vt100 is insane (even though HTML
will render just fine on a vt100), and completely misses the point of using
computers to get work done. It's *good* that they can do new things, and
formatting is valuable. You may have found ways around it (note the *'s I use
above because I can't use bold), but why should the entire world "work around"
the problems of people who will never upgrade. This is common of many geek
complaints. We've worked around not having something, or we don't need it for
our jobs, so it isn't important. I say this as a recent HTML-ranter who has
recently realized what I hypocrite I was being. Can HTML be overused? Sure. So
can 10-line ASCII signatures. But that doesn't mean that formatted text isn't a
good thing (and something we had for years before email; and now we're supposed
to give it up?)

Basically this boils down to we geeks saying "no, you can't have formatting in
email because <blah blah, implementation detail about searching or rendering or
bandwidth or whatnot, using ancient tools>." The user response is correct: "you
guys are the geeks; aren't you supposed to make this stuff work? It works fine
for us non-technical types." And given the fact that we're talking a
platform-independent, open standard with tons of existing, free,
implementations, are they wrong?

I'm not going to go into the detail here (may later), but another one to soul
search about is attachments. User mails attachment to 100 other users. This is
bad for the system, but it's what the user meant to do (and has lots of
advantages over "posting to a web page and sending a link"). Are the problems
with the system evidence of a dumb user (doing the obvious), or is it evidence
that we haven't developed an infrastructure that handles what users want to do.
Think for a few minutes about how you would design an email system that *could*
handle this kind of use. Shouldn't take long (I'll send you the answer if you
like, but we're all smart geeks here. Hint: garbage collection). Who's fault is
it that we don't have that system?

It's time to stop blaming users for wanting to get their jobs done without
having to always worry about how the tool is implemented. It's time we started
implementing better (and more functional) tools.

Rob