[fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> Also, there as no specific person I targeted in
> fpc-devel. Almost all posts lately contain about 95% quoted text! How
> does a moderator fail to see this?

I really don't want to prolong this and perhaps upset more people than 
necessary, but has it occurred to you that that's how mailing lists work 
and that possibly your expectations are unreasonable?

You've previously said that you found excessive quoting irritating (you 
might have put it a bit more strongly than that) because you viewed 
messages in a browser: I believe that a number of people suggested at 
the time that that was quite simply your own fault for using the wrong 
tool for the job.

I agree that excessive quoting is to be avoided. However the reasons 
that quoting became part of the mailing list and (in particular) Usenet 
doctrines were (a) because certain brands of client software- in 
particular anything provided by Microsoft- were very poor as managing 
threading and (b) particularly in the early days messages were regularly 
lost or arrived out of sequence.

In fact it's not at all uncommon even today to find that messages are 
lost from a thread because they fail a gateway's acceptance criteria: 
suspect headers, attachments in a context where they're not expected, 
and so on. In other words it's still important that discussion groups of 
various forms be "self healing", and the conventional mechanism for that 
is by appropriate quoting including- and some people miss this out- a 
"So-and-so wrote:" line at the top of the body as well as possibly a 
"View this message in context" URL at the bottom.

But I'm sure that nobody not born yesterday didn't know that >:-)

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]