Top-posting &c. (was Re: [ANNC] pybotwar-0.8)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 18 Aug 2012 10:27:10 -0700, rusi wrote:

> For example, my sister recently saw some of my mails and was mystified
> that I had sent back 'blank mails' until I explained and pointed out
> that my answers were interleaved into what was originally sent!

No offence to your sister, who I'm sure is probably a really great person 
and kind to small animals and furry children, but didn't she, you know, 
*investigate further* upon seeing something weird, namely a "blank" email?

As in, "Gosh, dearest brother has sent me an email without saying 
anything. That's weird. I hope he's alright? Maybe there's something a 
bit further down? Or a funny picture of a cat at the end? Or something? I 
better scroll down a bit further and see."

I'm not talking about "complicated tech stuff" like View > Message Source 
and trying to determine whether perhaps the MIME type is broken and 
there's an invisible attachment. I'm talking about almost the simplest 
thing in the friggin' world, *scrolling down and looking at what's there*.
The software equivalent of somebody handing you a "blank" piece of paper 
and turning it around to see if maybe there's something on the back.

Because that's what I do, and I don't think I'm some sort of hyper-
evolved mega-genius with a brain the size of a planet, I'm just some guy. 
Nobody needed to tell me "Hey dummy, the text you are looking for is a 
bit further down, keep reading." I just looked on my own, and saw the 
text on my own, and actually read it without being told to, and a little 
light bulb went on over my head and I went "Wow! People can actually 
write stuff in between other stuff! How did they do that?"

Now sure, I make allowances for 70 year olds who have never touched a 
computer before and have to ask "What's a scroll bar?" and "How do I use 
this mousey-pointer thing?" I assume your sister has minimal skills like 
"can scroll" and "knows how to read".

I'm not sure which is worse -- that perhaps I *am* some sort of mega-
genius and keep overestimating the difficulty of scroll-down-and-read for 
normal people, or that others have such short attention spans that 
anything that they can't see immediately in front of them might as well 
not exist. Either thought is rather depressing.



-- 
Steven