In a recent post, John Gruber points out a new bug that popped up in Apple’s Mail.app when formatting replies. This “bug” only occurs in Mail.app after applying the Safari 3.1 update and is apparently attributable to the new WebKit update. I’ll spare you the geeky details.
I love Mr. Gruber’s articles in Daring Fireball and link to him often [full disclosure: I am a tee shirt wearing member] but I have to say that he is really being a bit nit-picky on this point. The first thing to recognize is that in order to have ever seen this bug one would need to force Mail.app out of its default Rich Text formatting and into Plain Text composing. But let’s hold off on this point for a moment. It seems that the article is not to bring to light a missing blank line in response attribution, but to point readers to an earlier article about email etiquette, specifically top-posting, a practice he describes as “an uncouth and illiterate practice.”
I strongly disagree with the argument that top-posting is “an uncouth and illiterate practice,” much as I disagree with his argument about punctuation placement in conjunction with quotation usage, but that is another article. Gruber, though very close to my age, holds true to internet standards from, in terms of the web, a long-forgotten time. A time in which IRC and BBS ruled the infant web. He also participates in a much more elite (or 1337 if you will) group of technology users, that of the programmer. These people live and breathe plain text. Even as I consider myself to be a technology geek, they are the geek equivalent of the Hell’s Angel’s one-percenters. But does it really remove him this far from the reality of our current email standards?
My line of work has me spending my days offering technology solutions to persons who, on the whole, have very little understanding of the devices they are using. They have a goal and these shiny machines should help them achieve that goal in an easier and more efficient manner than, say using pencil and paper. The technology should just work and get out of their way (another article for another time). Towards that goal, programmers and their managers have made decisions to simplify work-flows in their software. We know these as default values, and most users live in this world. It is my experience that many users do not even know where to find their preference panes, if they even know what a preference pane is.
In his article, Gruber posits that email responses should favor bottom-posting, a practice that formats an email as an ongoing conversation. Although there are contexts for such methods, 99% of users do not live in such contexts. If I were to begin to send emails formatted in this fashion to my customers, I would begin receiving responses like, “Did you forget to send a reply?” Users cannot be bothered to scroll down to view a response. In fact, they have been trained not to by that default behavior put into email clients. The current defaults we live with are: Rich Text, Top-posting, and forwarding stupid junk to everyone in your address book. Sorry, that last one is not part of the software. Whereas a few years ago I would have agreed that Plain Text was best for compatibility, every major client, desktop or web-based support standards-based Rich Text, and if they don’t then stop using the email address provided by your ISP and get a Gmail account.
I do agree with Gruber’s follow-up article which really gets to the finer points of email etiquette in real-world scenarios, but in linking not to this article but to the more chin-beard, Man Page article about top posting, he got me all worked up and just had to write this response. Truth is, quoting the relevant portions is a great practice and should be more widely instituted. But first, I need to teach my family how not to forward forwards that were forwarded to them as a forward.
