Post formatting (was Re: MIME cruft vs. straight ASCII 128)

[Karsten M. Self]

on Sun, Oct 14, 2001 at 05:07:45PM -0700, Tim May (tcmay at got.net) wrote:
> On Sunday, October 14, 2001, at 02:58 PM, measl at mfn.org wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 14 Oct 2001, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> >
> >> Could you please try posting *legible* content?  This is utterly
> >> unreadable.

> > Your constant bitching about formatting is old.  I have posted it as I
> > received it - ugly, from a windblow$ luser.

> I agree with Measl. I sent "Karsten M. Self" (if that's his real name)
> to the cornfield for his worthless contributions and willful ignorance.
>
> I got the "Anthrax protocol issued" post just fine. Maybe it's because I
> have "Show MIME" disabled. Maybe "Karsten M. Self" is complaining
> because he has MIME enabled.

Nope.  Pulling the same lne.com feed Tim is.  There were a number of odd
nonstandard characters (resolved as <ctrl>+ S, R, and W, mostly "smart
quotes"), and in general poor linewrapping / spacing.  That <ctrl>-S
character is particularly annoying to root out on a GNU/Linux system.

My general list formatting preferences are pretty vanilla:

  - 72 character lines.
  - Postfix (reply-after-quote) response.
  - Attribution lines corresponding to quoted content.
  - Quoted-line prefix, preferably '> ' or '>'.
  - Standard ASCII content, as opposed to extended charactersets, HTML,
    or proprietary document formats.

The growing disregard of such conventions in many contexts is a growing
annoyance of the Net.

I happen to prefer signing messages per RFC 2015, and it's largely
habitual.  As lne.com de-mimes such attachments, this shouldn't be an
issue for much of this list.  I'm not an absolutist on MIME and extended
character sets, believing there are appropriate uses.   I'm satisfied
with the recent coverage of this topic here, no need to elaborate.

My point regards formatting:  in the majority of cases, a few moments
with a text editor is sufficient to greatly increase readability of of
posted content.  I happen to use vim, and can untangle most posts in
under a minute.  This is a matter of respect:  one person's doing so
saves the remainder the effort.  I've noted that the posts I've bounced
to list reformatted tend to gather response where originals don't.

I also prefer to denote cited text via indentation as:

    an example of a block
    of cited text.

I don't believe these are extraordinary preferences, and even sustpect
Mr. May may agree with me on several.

Peace.

--
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>       http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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