Off-topic: Communication. (was: Connect string again)

Michael,

It's generally not considered good form to move a private conversation
to a newsgroup or mailing list without mutual consent, but since you
have chosen to do so, I don't mind commenting briefly. In fact, among
the many mailing lists and newsgroups I read, the PostgreSQL lists are
noticably more difficult to read than most, so it might be useful.
I'll thus take the opportunity to sum up some common problems below.

Michael Meskes <meskes(at)topsystem(dot)de> writes:

> It's horrible, isn't it? There is a way to tell M$ Exchange to not
> put the answered mail at the end. But Exchange isn't able to use
> international standars, like Re: for reply.- It insist on AW: for
> the german Antwort.

It is, indeed, horrible. One would think that as time passed, the
software available to us for communication would get better, and this
was the case until personal computing started complicating things.
Those who write software for the mass market know that quality is not
worth a large investment of time and money. Instead, products must
come out in ever new versions, each with more colors, longer feature
lists and more marketing hype than the last.

Microsoft is much worse than most (although Lotus and Netscape are not
that far behind, to name but two). A reasonable explanation for this
has two parts: first, the teenagers who write software for Microsoft
have little or no experience with the network community and the way
things have been done here since the beginning, and second, they have
the secure knowledge that this does not matter. Thus, what they don't
know about standards and conventions on the net, they certainly aren't
going to bother to find out. What they do will be the new "standard",
effective immediately, because of the label on the box.

> So I have to stick with Outlook.

I feel sorry for you if you have an employer so lacking in common
sense that you're forced to use a Microsoft application for email. It
is one thing to demand that employees use Microsoft's poor excuse for
an operating system, but you should at least be allowed to use what
you want for tasks where it cannot make a difference to anyone but you
which tool you choose.

> > I'm considering telling Procmail to dump anything written with Outlook
> > (that's its name, right?) directly into /dev/null. It takes too much
> > time trying to figure out what the context of the message is.
>
> Good move.

I suspect sarcasm. :-) Actually, I'd like to defend this as being,
indeed, a good move. I always have so many interesting things to do,
and very much want to use my time as effeciently as I can. With the
sheer volume of traffic on the PostgreSQL mailing lists, this means
that I have to make an effort to get as much out of reading the lists
as I possibly can. This, unfortunately, includes _not_ reading much
of the material posted to the lists. But what not to read?

Of course, I try to skip lightly over discussions on topics that I
don't find very interesting. That's not the hardest part. The real
problem is in the threads of discussion that I really want to follow.
In the "good old days", technical mailing lists and newsgroups were
generally easy to read, because most people followed the same set of
conventions: text was properly formatted for 80 column terminals,
common quoting rules made it easy to see what was old and new in a
message, and selective quoting of relevant bits of what was being
commented on made it easy to follow a thread of discussion smoothly.
You could very quickly determine whether a message held interesting
material or not. If some newcomer didn't follow conventions, they
were pointed out to him or her, and everything was fine.

These days, it's not always so easy. In many of the fora I follow,
things are still the way they were. The NetBSD mailing lists, for
instance, are easy to read -- almost everybody follows conventions.
Here on the PostgreSQL mailing lists, however, the picture is very
much different: every new message that I read is fundamentally
different from the last, so I have to _start_ by figuring out what the
syntax and semantics of this particular message happens to be. After
sorting out multi-part MIME, quoting, new content only at top or only
at bottom, visually coming to grips with overlong lines and quoted
printable encoding and so on and so forth, I can finally start to
evaluate whether the content of the message is interesting. This
takes enough time that I could have digested two or three properly
presented messages in the time it takes to get ready to start reading
one of the ones produced by newcomers with "modern" software!

The whole point of conventions is to ease communication!

- Stick to at most 75 characters per line. Monospaced displays of
80 character width are the norm, and lines longer than that are
difficult to read comfortably anyway, especially on-screen.

- Write plain text. Do not use HTML formatting and suchlike, since
it makes it very difficult for those who don't use a web browser
to read their mail to read the text.

- Quote selectively, using "> " in front of quoted text, and clearly
indicating who wrote what you're quoting. (See the early parts of
this message for what I mean.)

- Avoid MIME "multipart" messages when not needed. Particularly, do
not use VCARD and the like, and do not let your email software
generate an alternative HTML version of the text.

- Above all, remember that you're the one trying to communicate your
thoughts to others, so it's your responsibility to do this well!

-tih
--
Popularity is the hallmark of mediocrity. --Niles Crane, "Frasier"