Use em’s over i’s in your code

I don’t understand what you mean.

I’m failing to see how your physical analogy fits fully in a virtual discussion — I understand where you’re leaning towards here, but don’t really see how you can strongly compare someone’s odor to the quality of their conversation.

The point of the analogy is how image/presentation may influence priorities and actions regardless of content quality.

In online communication, shoddy-looking mail messages (web sites, whatever) may bias someone towards skipping or delaying them in favor of ones that are more visually appealing even if the former has superior content. Specific example:

You’ve got dozens of unread messages from different friends in some inbox, one being a rather illegible broken-quoted text with a “please read and respond!” subject. How motivated will you be to dredge the supposedly-valued content out from its broken context before handling other messages that require less time and effort to process?

For me anyway, if message or site formatting/style impedes my ability to quickly “grok” enough content to deem value then whatever it is usually gets bumped to a lower processing priority. If someone leaves an impression of not putting effort into or caring about what they intend to convey then it doesn’t inspire effort or caring on my part. Of course, there are different levels of formality and context to consider.

Anyhoo. I’d hoped there’d be interest in the subtopic of separating data and presentation layers but ended up in this subtopic alley instead.

I’m failing to see how your physical analogy fits fully in a virtual discussion — I understand where you’re leaning towards here, but don’t really see how you can strongly compare someone’s odor to the quality of their conversation.

Someone’s bad breath, body odor and appearance can be uncomfortably distracting even when they have something important to say.

Or, someone’s pleasant fragrance and appearance may be comfortably distracting when what they’re saying is a load of crap.

When someone wants to influence my initial impression of the worthiness of engaging in conversation, the latter usually gets more immediate attention than the former. But the more “interesting” conversation will eventually win my attention if we both stick around long enough with enough patience.

Hmm.

I can see your point on structure — and I’ll agree that I do this as well with exception to extreme, overly busy situations where I find myself responding to ichats in a tasteless furry. My view is that it holds less weight than the discussion at hand is all, but I can see both ends:)

The point was to not hang on the ‘how it is said or written’; that this element is cosmetic and no where near as important as the theme of the discussion.

I guess that right there is our fundamental disagreement. I don’t think that maintaining a conversational flow and tone is merely cosmetic. I tend to compose my thoughts before I speak, and I tend to trim and contextualize and quote my e-mails before I hit Send, and I think they are both matters of respect for the people I’m conversing with. It doesn’t always save me from being offensive (see above), but it helps.
[I said:]

I’m perfectly willing to forgive an ignorance of that style for quick one-offs, but when directly addressing questions, top-posting is just juvenile, even boorish.

To expand on my own point: I discuss the two extremes here: quick one-off replies (meaning, basically, things that won’t be archived for later reference), vs. directly addressing questions from a prior message. There’s a lot of grey area in between where I prefer the One True Way, but am really quite forgiving :-)

If uber-geeks didn’t argue about things like email-reply formatting, we’d argue abut inane things like American Idol. Everyone argues. We just argue about stuff that matters.

I think so highly of what I’m saying that I don’t need to pay attention to how I say it. You, miserable peons, must sift through what I say and put my meaning together…

I was a political editor for many years, and while I think highly of my comments (and I hope you all do to), I do not think of anyone else as ‘miserable peons’ — so I’ll write that off as me taking your analogy more literal than the tongue in cheek intent it was meant to be?

But I’m going to take a cue from Dan here and note that since we’ve spent so much time talking about this, even actually calling other people who top post juvenile, even borish; does in fact make me feel as if I’m being stuck up, juvenile, and boorish for even subscribing to arguing this debate.

The point, again, is it’s cosmetic — to fight it so heavily ignore the root of the discussion; this arguement to me is not so much about how we write responses about email, but how we bicker about the presentation of conversation in writing vs reading the content — decipher or no.

Moving beyond personal preferences, I was reminded of a meta-perspective on the posting style debate which argues that mail systems are the underlying culprit. Excerpting from Calvin Spealman’s comment buried under others at Fighting the top reply:

The real problem here comes down to a core issue with the email system, that there is too much binding between the digital structure of the email and the visual presentation of that email.

My brief response to a related reply:

I certainly agree and even wrote up a few design ideas for it, geeze, around ten years ago. ['it' referring to the separation of the data layer from the presentation layer]

Surely enough mail system developers have realized this but for some reason nothing significant has been done about it (that I’m aware of anyway). Hmm.

stop listening to how I say it and listen to what I say:)

In other words: “I think so highly of what I’m saying that I don’t need to pay attention to how I say it. You, miserable peons, must sift through what I say and put my meaning together, because I’m not willing to spend an extra couple of seconds composing my thoughts into a conversational style.”
(That goes for either cursing during Calculus or top-posting.)

Myself: I believe, very strongly, that interwoven, conversational style is the One and Only True Way. I’m perfectly willing to forgive an ignorance of that style for quick one-offs, but when directly addressing questions, top-posting is just juvenile; even boorish.