Re: Extra data in posts

barsalou wrote, on 7/14/2006 7:01 PM:

> I didn't think I was being unreasonable with my request.

I agreed with you 100%, Mike -- especially when folks quote three
hundred lines of text with a one-sentence reply. It offends my
sense of efficiency.

I've also been thinking about top- vs. bottom-posting.

First of all, I'm a bottom-poster and an inline replier ... but I
think that I understand how this happened, and it's not just
Microsoft's fault. Bear with me for a moment. I just made all of this
up, but it seems reasonable to me. :)

The crux of the matter is that most mail clients -- not just Outlook,
but most mail clients, including everything from pine to Eudora to
Thunderbird -- default to showing you the *top* of the message.

The reasons for this "top-displaying" design are multiple:

A. Readers want to see the summary/metadata first -- sender, recipients,
subject, etc. This metadata is conceptually assumed to be at "the top"
of the message, like paper letters and memos. Some clients preserve
that metaphor by display selected headers along with the body as a
continuous sequence of records.

B. Mail clients today grew from mail clients of yesterday, designed to
fit much smaller screens in which only a small part of the screen might
be available to display the message body.

C. Message bodies, on the other hand, have information-processing needs
that vary based on the type of message. If I get a long letter from
Mom, I want to see the top of the body first and scroll to the bottom
as I'm reading. If I am participating in a thread, however, I want to
see the most recent information, since I remember most of the rest of it
already.

If you are Joe User, trying to follow a long thread that has had many
replies, then bottom-posting makes the per-conversation cost increase
rapidly because you have to scroll to the bottom of every message --
especially if you don't know any keyboard shortcuts.

My proposed solution, which I've just come up with :), is to make
small improvements in mail clients' thread awareness, which in turn
enables me to show the bottoms of threaded messages, I could show my
top-posting friends how to bottom-post with a much lower cost. Here's
how I see what would be needed:

- Separate the display of metadata from the body (which many clients
  already do). Make sure that the header data is configurable to be
  "anchorable", and the body scrollable. This is to support the need
  to have this metadata initially displayed at each new reading.

- If the message is an initial message (not in reply to anything),
  default to showing the *top* of the body in the scrollable window.

- If the message is clearly in reply to something and cannot fit in the
  current display, default to showing the *bottom* of the body in the
  scrollable window (in other words, already scrolled to the bottom).

- Allow configurable thread detection and reconstruction. Since headers
  and threading are not always preserved (people creating a new message
  to reply to a thread, replying to digests without changing the subject
  line, etc.), and since thread detection would be important for making
  my idea work, allow the user to configure how the client detects a
  non-initial message, something like:

    [ ] Detect and reconstruct threads
    When reconstructing interrupted threads,
        [ ] Use header datestamps to resequence the message
        [ ] Treat my last Received: line as the [selectable] timezone.
        [ ] Use subject lines (Re: re: re:)
        [ ] Detect and use evidence of nested quotation

I have no idea if anyone's already tackled this problem or not. A
brief Googling didn't turn up much other than people reconstructing
threads for specific large mailing-list archives.

If you visualize having threaded messages already scrolled to the
bottom, it seems a little strange but *really* makes sense, IMO.

Or did I go a bit too far with this one? :)

Royce

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Royce D. Williams                                - IP Engineering, ACS
personal: [first]@alaska.net                  - PGP: 3FC087DB/1776A531
work: [first.last]@acsalaska.net         - http://www.tycho.org/royce/
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