[WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 21 Jan 2007 at 07:42, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> 
wrote:

> This is my very first experience with a Mailing List of any kind. Please
> bear with me. Are you saying that, when replying, I should delete all other
> material on the original message except the exact statement(s) I am replying
> to?

Normal netiquette (though subject to some degree of debate, as with 
just about anything on the Internet) is to trim down the quoted 
material to the relevant portions and reply beneath them.  Exactly 
what is "relevant" may be up for discussion; certainly, the exact 
statements you're replying to are relevant, and perhaps a little bit 
more that's related to them (lest you be accused of taking quotes out 
of context), but certainly such things as message headers and 
footers, and entire paragraphs that have nothing to do with anything 
you're replying to, are irrelevancies that should be snipped.

Here, mailing list reply style differs from the style often enforced 
in corporate communications, where they insist on preserving the 
entire thread history (somewhat wastefully) in order that the 
participants can follow the CYA (cover your ass) principle by showing 
that they received all parts of the previous messages (even while 
often showing, in their replies, that they failed to have any decent 
degree of reading comprehension as to actually understanding any of 
it).

More info:
http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/

As for your other problem, with character sets, your mail program is 
apparently putting in such things as "curly" quotes and apostrophes 
in the proprietary Macintosh character encoding, which has these 
characters in different positions from the proprietary Windows 
character encoding that many of the readers support; however, your 
messages are also going out without any header indicating what 
character encoding they are in, which means that standards-compliant 
readers should render them as US-ASCII, a 7-bit character encoding 
containing only 128 different characters (including control 
characters) which does not include any of the "extended" characters 
of either the Mac or Windows proprietary encodings, or of more 
standardized encodings such as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8.  What it means is 
that you're better off sticking to plain-ASCII straight quotes and 
apostrophes unless you can get your program to send the more exotic 
characters in a standards-compliant, platform-independent way.

http://mailformat.dan.info/body/charsets.html


-- 
== Dan ==
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