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From: Doug Schwarz <see@sig.for.address.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.matlab
Subject: Re: New Newsreader application at MATLAB Central
References: <f71hc3$gut$1@fred.mathworks.com> <f72kv7$b4i$1@fred.mathworks.com> <f72lau$g1q$1@fred.mathworks.com> <f72mr7$bs0$1@fred.mathworks.com> <f72ohe$sho$1@canopus.cc.umanitoba.ca>
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In article <f72ohe$sho$1@canopus.cc.umanitoba.ca>,
 roberson@ibd.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca (Walter Roberson) wrote:

> In article <f72mr7$bs0$1@fred.mathworks.com>,
> Helen Chen <helen.chen@mathworks.com> wrote:
> 
> >You are right that there is no quoting functionality in the current 
> >newsreader. The design objective was to try to reduce message clutter in 
> >threads.  
> 
> Then someone got the wrong design objective. That design objective
> might perhaps be okay in something like a vBulletin forum, inherently
> graphical, but proper quoting is ESSENTIAL in Usenet discussions,
> which are asynchronous -text- entities of inconsistent delivery
> and inconsistent retention. If the goal was to design something for
> use only with messages that stay on one site, then the designers
> may do whatever they think will "work" for the site, but if the goal
> is to produce messages gatewayed to Usenet, then the quoting must be
> not just possible, and not just practical: it must be the default.

[snip]

> I note, by the way, that what I quoted is all one long line, not
> two lines, as was the quote from the poster you were replying to.
> That suggests that the online reader is doing visible word wrap
> but that that word wrap is not being translated into newlines when
> the message is sent out to Usenet. The result will likely often
> be in technical violation of the NNTP RFCs, which place a limit
> (not particularily high) on the number of characters permitted per line.
> NNTP servers which detect longer lines are, under the RFCs,
> justified in rejecting the message as being technically non-conforming,
> just as much as if it were missing essential headers.


I was just about to address exactly these two issues so thank you Walter 
for doing it for me.

I completely agree -- quoting is absolutely essential and must be the 
default.  While we're at it, how about putting the cursor at the end of 
the quoted material so as to discourage top posting?

Note the way my newsreader does quoting above (I am not using the new 
interface).

-- 
Doug Schwarz
dmschwarz&ieee,org
Make obvious changes to get real email address.