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Mozilla Messaging Devs Don't Want To Duplicate Outlook
Petr Krcmar writes "Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 was released last month. A few months before, two main developers left the project and development was moved from the Mozilla Corporation to the Mozilla Messaging, the new subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. We had the opportunity to ask some questions to David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging CEO. The interview is about present and future of Thunderbird and about related projects like SeaMonkey, Spicebird and Mozilla Calendar."
Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot on some forum. Here is a Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot direct link.
There's a good book about this, called "The Mac is not a Typewriter:" http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-Professional-Level-Macintosh/dp/0938151312 It's not specific to the Mac, but it tries to dispel the old ways of thinking about how to create documents. (i.e. use the tab stops in your word processor instead of just hitting space a bunch, stuff like that, use only one space behind a period when using a variable-width font, etc.) It applies equally well to all GUI computers, but was written back when the Mac was about the only one out there.
This is one of those endless debates between old fogeys who hate everything that didn't already exist in 1975, and people who realize that, hey, paragraph breaks make a hell of a lot more sense than line breaks!
Comment of the year
I wrote an email parser about five years ago, and I can tell you that there is a good compromise to the problem you describe in the email standards implemented by virtually all mail clients (MUAs).
The header "format=flowed" lets you send text/plain messages that look great whether you are reading it with telnet or pine or with Thunderbird or any other modern MUA. The main rfc for email, RFC 2822, explains that the sending MUA should, but is not required to, break up paragraphs into lines of less than 78 characters terminated by a carriage return/line feed. If you specify the "format=flowed" header described in RFC 2646, you allow the receiving client to rewrap the email according to the receiving user's preference. Typically modern MUAs will rewrap format-flowed plaintext email to the window size.
The specification states that lines ending with a space and then a CLRF are to be treated as part of a single paragraph that can be rewrapped. Hard breaks are then done by terminating the line with a simple CLRF with no preceding space.
Most modern MUAs that I have dealt with can (and typically by default) send format-flowed email that has the standard line breaks every 78 characters for the benefit of clients that cannot rewrap, and contain contextual clues for newer mail clients to seamlessly reformat the message body. For example, Apple's Mail.app by default sends multi-part MIME messages, one part containing the rich text email and the other part containing format=flowed text/plain. No matter what email client the recipient is using, at least one of those options will look acceptable.
You can find a pretty good write-up of this at Dan's Mail Format Site.
Because Outlook's text editor sucks to the point that top-posting is basically the only way to make it work.
Outlook has two default text styles: "compose" and "reply." Assuming nobody bothers changing them, after the second reply everyone will be typing in the same font and color.
This means that you have to manually alter you text to make it stand out if you're replying to a reply.
Plus, as an added bonus, Outlook's quote is just an indent and a set of email headers. There's no nice ">" at the start of each quoted line or nice blue line like there is in Thunderbird.
And, because as already mentioned, Outlook's email editor sucks, Outlook really doesn't handle inserting new lines of text into quoted sections that well. Assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting it will simply unindent the line of text. However, you'll still be typing in the blue "reply" format unless you've changed that style, so the only queue that it's a reply is that it's not indented. Unless you're the first reply after an email is sent, then by default you'll be typing blue and their text will remain black. But after one round, this is lost.
But there's still that "assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting" thing I just mentioned. Throw in bullets or numbered lists (and keep in mind, Outlook like Word loves auto-formatting things) and things can get a little screwy. Those generally will prevent your text from being indented.
I actually did do an "inline reply" to an email that used a numbered list in Outlook, and that had the effect of resetting the numbered list numbers - instead of keeping the number from the original email, it started counting over again from 1. Not a problem if you're replying to all the original items, but...
In short, it's because Outlook's email editor basically sucks. It wants to be an embedded Word instead of an email editor.
For those who've never used Outlook, I've essentially formatted my post in a general "Outlook reply" format. Keep in mind that the quoted section would just be indented, without the little quote lines that Slashdot has added.
From: Imsdal (930595)Sent: Tuesday, June 10 2008 01:05 PM
To: slashdot.org
Subject: Re:As well they shoouldn't
I hate having to figure out who said what in which e-mail when I'm at work (using Outlook).
Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway? When I started using message boards in the early '80s, almost everyone quickly learned to quote properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff and so on. Now it seems to be a completely lost art. I have had people at work ask me, in all seriousness, why I didn't top post and what those strange ">" characters meant.
I agree that threading is important now, but it is (IMNSHO) a technological solution to a social problem. I find hat unfortunate..
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.