Re: [ATM] Replying to digest messages

["Bob May" <bobmay@nethere.com>]

>Are you starting a new thread or replying to one of the many posts that
>happened that day?  You as a digest receiver has the additional
>responsibility of figuring out how to get the response you have done to the
>right thread in the right place as well as making a responsive reply.

One of the things I dream of is a list digest program that makes intellegent
use
of HTML.  So far I have only seen what appeared to be pretty stupid use of
HTML.

Here are some useful features a list digest program could add with HTML.

1. Turn the table of contents into a set of links so you don't have to
manually
scroll all the way down to a particular message of interest.

2. Make mailto links with subject automatically appended for each message
subject line.  This would deal with the issue quoted above.

3. Put next and previous links between messages to reduce the amount of
scrolling needed to get from one message to the next or previous.


This doesn't mean I think list messages, that is individual messages from
list
members to the list should be in html, just that intellegent use of very
basic
html in digests could make them quite a bit more user friendly.

Mark Holm
mdholm@telerama.com

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Bob, concerning replies to posts: your replies are
generally very useful but would be much better if you
would include a short segment of the text that you are
specifically replying to. Often times, 5 to 10 people
have made comments on a particular thread, and then
you will respond, but pretty much >>you<< are the only
one who can figure out which particular comment in
which particular post you are referring to. This would
be quite helpful to others whom you are trying to
assist. It is not hard to set your email so that you
automatically will have the entire text below your
response (as I do here) and then you can delete what
you don't want to respond to.

This is my second request to you to do this.

Guy

--- Bob May <bobmay@nethere.com> wrote:

> I really don't understand why so many use the digest
> version of the list.
> The losses are that you have to do a bit of work to
> post to the thread and
> that you lose the threading of the posts on your
> machine.  I usually keep
> about a month's worth of postings in the Deleted box
> so I can go back and
> reread where things have been on a thread that I'm
> interested in and by
> looking at the subject line,

Guy  Brandenburg
Washington, DC
My home page:
http://home.earthlink.net/~gfbranden/GFB_Home_Page.html

Ken, et al, we all have out idiosyncracies.  It's odd that this is the only
place that there are people are requesting that I post what I'm replying to.
It seems that, for some reason, people here don't keep track of the threads
of the conversations but rather seem to be reading digests where threads are
a lot more difficult to read.  The above is what I've got after a cleanup of
my deleted folder a few days ago.  This is quite enough for me to remember
what the discussion is all about.
Bob May
bobmay@nethere.com
http://nav.to/bobmay
http://bobmay.astronomy.net

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