Maybe the answer is to return to sending plaintext emails? HTML emails are an abomanation. Rather than extend them, just ditch them.
This means that replies in-line, or below quoted text are instantly hidden and then you get complaints from the technically challenged who insist the email you sent was blank.
I tried to educate and fight back for a long time, but too many important things were lost to those who insist on writing right where the cursor appears instead of taking a moment to position it thoughtfully, and alas the rest is history.
Which is a great thing.
I know, not a popular opinion here, but top posting saves a lot of time in catching up with long email chains.
If you don't agree, pick an old style mailing-list like a Linux kernel discussion, choose a discussion with 20+ emails in and read it from top to bottom. You'll quickly realize how exhausting inline quoting is.
If context isn't required, then don't include it. Inline replies act as a forcing function, directing people to reply to the substance of what was said. That necessarily includes eliding irrelevant bits, which is often the most helpful aspect. Neither top posting nor bottom posting help emphasize substance.
In high quality forums inline posting is extremely useful for both reader and author. For the Outlook and Twitter set, it's a pointless debate.
Or you're catching up on a discussion that happened in the past, reading each email one after the other. Again, the context is secondary, so the best place is to put it below the signature. Again, top posting wins.
For these rare emails where specific answers need to be positioned below some specific context, the writer of the email needs to have the discipline to put it there, and this can be achieved with top posting as well.
Inline quoting has really no good reason to exist in most email chains.
If you don't agree, keep on reading.
hota_mazi writes:
> The fact that Gmail hides the quoted portion actually encourages people to use top posting more.
> Which is a great thing.
> I know, not a popular opinion here, but top posting saves a lot of time in catching up with long email chains.
> If you don't agree, pick an old style mailing-list like a Linux kernel discussion, choose a discussion with 20+ emails in and read it from top to bottom. You'll quickly realize how exhausting inline quoting is.
> lozf writes:
>> Gmail also had a big hand in the reduction of top posting, by hiding the quoted message by default (click the little '...' icon to see it).
>> This means that replies in-line, or below quoted text are instantly hidden and then you get complaints from the technically challenged who insist the email you sent was blank.
>> I tried to educate and fight back for a long time, but too many important things were lost to those who insist on writing right where the cursor appears instead of taking a moment to position it thoughtfully, and alas the rest is history.
>> Spivak writes:
>>> Top posting only won in places where everyone uses Outlook. Mailing lists still use quoted style.
>>> js2 writes:
>>>> We have lost this battle, but keep fighting the good fight. We've also lost to top-posting and JavaScript.
>>>> Sir_Cmpwn writes:
>>>>> Maybe the answer is to return to sending plaintext emails? HTML emails are an abomanation. Rather than extend them, just ditch them.
100a I must express myself clearly when posting. <return><esc>Almost all email clients default to top-quoting, and bottom quoting requires more work, because you need to cut out irrelevant parts. It's not easy to get people who have never bottom-quoted to start.
Edit: Ok, I found this: http://www.idallen.com/topposting.html
I'm convinced that 'bottom posting' is superior.
Top posting won for a reason: it saves everyone a lot of time.
How do you mean? I've seen bottom posting be essentially abused, by folks that quote the entire preceeding email (and even others before it) before typing their 1 line reply. Or worse, folks that quote a giant thread and insert 1-2 line responses throughout the quoting, which require the reader to hunt for them. It seems that those cases could have been avoided by just cherry picking & quoting only what you wanted to respond to.
Or is there some other situation you have in mind with your response?
Because you keep reading the same thing over and over again while all you want to do is read the new content:
===
a
===
> a
b
===
> > a
> b
c
===
The problem with top posting is that people systematically quote everything.
Inline quoting is what you just did here. It is the natural way for a discussion. The only interest of top posting is if you add new people to a thread and for them, bottom posting would be far more legible.
I'd say it's the other way around.
Top posting fixes the problem of people quoting everything since everything is put below the signature.
The problem with inline quoting is that people quote entire paragraphs, even when they only mean to respond to a single sentence. Which leads to deluges of quoted text you have to scroll and scroll through until you reach the new content.
With Gmail and a top posted email discussion, I can catch up with the entire discussion with "n", read a few lines, "n", read a few lines, ... With inline quoting, catching up on such a discussion is exhausting.
The main evidence for this is that where I work (and surely in other places well), people who use Outlook end up re-inventing inline quoting, badly. They write their answers inline and use coloring to distinguish them because Outlook has no proper quoting support.
And the reason is quite simple: if each mail in a thread is only a small number of sentences, then top posting is fine. However, when you're trying to do serious technical work via email, replying to specific points is necessary. Inline quoting is simply the best way of clearly indicating which part of the original email you're replying to.
If you need to give more context in your reply, you can quote a line or two in the above of your text. This is usually only needed for long messages. An example:
> This is a snipped from the message being replied to, i.e. quote.
> Just a line or two to give some context.
This is your text, where you you address the above concern. [More text...]
> Another quote regarding some other issue.
Your text here. The rule of thumb is to keep the quote shorter than your text.
Otherwise it is a huge pain.
While certain popular webmail clients push top-posting hard, I still see a lot more inline quoting in professional contexts, even where most users are using a client biased to top posting, than I see top posting.
They're a life saver. This is 2017, the least we can ask is that people take the time to use bold, italics, bullet points, tables, hyperlinks, and type faces to make their communications more cogent.
If you mean that "abuse of HTML" is an abomination, then yes, sure. But light use of HTML is extremely important today and my opinion of someone trying to communicate an important piece of information to me is directly related to how much care they have put into composing their email.
It's not HTML5 at all. If you want to do layouts, you must use tables. There are hacky things you have to do to display things correctly across all different types of clients.
You have tools like this: https://buttons.cm/ which generate abominable code for the sake of compatibility.
Also, Outlook uses the Word rendering engine to process HTML. It's janky, at best.
Instead of using floats and margins, you have to revert to using <table> for layouts. Otherwise, your emails just won't render correctly, much of the time.
It's not possible to support HTML fully in Webmail clients, either. Even without scripting, you could write an HTML email that overlays a malicious button on top of Gmail's web interface itself, and it would be too easy to phish people.
YAGNI.
Bold, italics, lists and particularly, code snippets and verbatim text would make HN a lot easier to follow.
like such
But a markdown formatter that sends the plaintext part as markdown seems like the perfect solution for both worlds. I don't mind reading markdown, it's designed for being readable, and I also write it often.
If you send HTML mails, they're simply more likely to land in the spam folder, where 80% of all HTML mails belong.
Any stats on that? I'd reckon you're in 5x9s territory for those that are reachable by HTML mail (vs. plaintext). Also I don't know about other mail clients but Thunderbird has a setting to send HTML email in plaintext too, choose your poison.
For me text based emails are far less common and are more often than not "Hi, my name Lena, I saw your info on Facebook and want to know you well [...]". Indeed the only non-spam plaintext emails I can recall are dev mailing list mails.
Links can be rendered from the text. But images and formatting is horrible.
Markdown seems like the format email should have used if it had existed.
I don’t think any major product uses it right now though, but I believe it’s supported by old versions of Apple Mail circa 2004.
How do you support attachments in text? Do you assume every "link" is a link? Do you modify your own system for adding attachments and referencing them in the body?
Oh wait. Now we're re-inventing the exact same thing again that HN users apparently consider evil.
Popular != good. Outlook is awful.
>How do you support attachments in text?
You don't. This is a benefit.
>Do you assume every "link" is a link?
Sure?
>Do you modify your own system for adding attachments and referencing them in the body?
No, you don't do this at all.
Plain
fucking
text.
Yes. And any system that wants to REMOVE the incumbent, has to replace it with superior features.
I mean, what are you actually trying to argue for here? You literally just used Markdown to add emphasis to your post.
Are you going to use a less expressive communication format for your important business e-mails... when you clearly use Markdown for internet comments with complete strangers?
I know HN is full of startups but I can't be the only person who actually interacts with clients on a daily basis.
If I wanted to emphasize in email I might use a very small subset of markdown's syntax (i.e. asterisks) but only as a coincidence - you know markdown is based on common plaintext email patterns, right?
RFC 2045
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Attachments are part of the MIME standard and are completely orthogonal to HTML email.