Why I Hate Forums: Access Tips, Usenet Alternatives? (Long)
Veli-Pekka Tätilä
Here are some generalized and very frustrating accessibility issues I
continuously run into in Web forums (or fora if you will). This is just
my opinion, and I don't deal with what's good in forums much, such as
the flat view with minimal quoting in threads, so your mileage may
definitely vary. Still I bet a number of legally blind Web users feel
the same as I do and I'd welcome any comments to improve matters
accessibilitywise, too. Note that this is an edited repost to Dolphin
Users, but I thought it might be potentially interesting reading here as
well. My core questions are:
Are there technical or spiritual successors to usenet news out there
which might become main stream?
Which Web forum platforms are the most keyboard accessible?
Do any of them have a Web service architecture on which people could
write their own native user interfaces on demand e.g. desktop GUis or
readers?
Although Ive been using Supernova for 10 years, computers even longer
and know plenty about WIndowes and programming, I still find that Web
fora present major accessibility issues and so I use them only when no
alternative medium exists. This in turn means I feel kinda left out from
main stream activities, since a lot of the old usenet news groups are
dead and many new topics don't receive newsgroups at all. Mailing lists
are OK, too, but compared to news you'll have to receive all mail, of
which about 5 to 10 % I read, and finding and subscribing to mailing
lists is much clumsier than for a news group. Web forums seem to be the
average Joe's discussion medium on the Inet these days, and many new
users have never even heard of the news, and find e-mail spam-driven and
antiquated. Forums are also technically more advanced in that they
support proper user profiles, access from anywhere, threading on the
server side in stead of the client program, flat views to discussions,
lots of smilies and other semantic markup and better moderation, to
mention but a few things.
The beauty of both usenet news and e-mail, though, is that they are just
a bunch of protocols for transfering data. Thus The user may freely
choose the kind of user interface he or she finds the most accessible
and keyboard usable, in the form of literally hundreds of different
e-mail and usenet news clients on the market. These apps have quite
advanced controls, are customizable, have hierarchical menus, hotkeys
and mnemonics, and in general provide a much friendlier experience than
Web pages.
Web forums in turn tie the user to a pparticular, Web based user
interface, and you cannot separate the presentation of content and the
underlying data model from each other easily. The Web is, even more than
the desktop graphical user interface, a mouse-driven, graphical medium
for the sighted in which spatial layout hints at grouping, aurally
meaningless attributes such as text properties are heavily used and
keyboard navigation is sequential, hard to discover and terribly
inefficient. Even though there's been a lot of talk about the Web being
multimodal and the importance of designing to various media, sighted
mouse users tend to still design for sighted mouse users and for desktop
screens. No screen reader I've used in Windows can even interpret aural
CSS; some half of the Web sites have basic accessibility issues and the
sighted Web designer simply doesn't think, not out of laziness or being
evil but simply due to ignorance, about accessibility much. He or she
doesn't often label forms, which is invisible anyway, virtually no-one
tweaks tab indeces and I've never come across accessible flash applets,
either, though the technical means to do it are out there.
As for particular issues I've had difficulties with, let's start out
with signing in. Many Web forums require the user to read mangled text
from an image and few offer audio alternatives or secret codes for the
blind. Though I can use a bit of magnification, the mangling makes such
text extremely hard to read and has often prevented me from subscribing
without sighted help.
Next, browsing threads is painful to say the least. The order of data on
the page is hard coded and cannot be customized to better suit the
user's needs. For instance, it would be horrible to listen to the sender
before the subject on a list in which I don't know many folks and filter
my reading primarily based on the subject line. Having to go through the
sender first takes time and prevemts me from getting to the gist of the
matter fast. I can either go through a list of subject line links one at
a time with the tab key and miss out the sender name, reply count and
other secondary attributes that are often still very useful. Or I can
cursor across and down such lists in area VF, which doesn't let me use
the site navigation hotkeys without usig SN's pass next key to app
command, and reading is very slow since I need continuous cursoring
effort to get a single table row read. Even worse is selection. If I
need to multiple select some items, check boxes are used for this.
checking serially each and every box, unchecking a bunch of them,
keeping track of which boxes out of all of them are checked and so on is
very tedious from the keyboard. If each messsage has an associated check
box with it does mean the tab order is twice as long, requiring me to
press tab twice to get to the next subject line, arrgh.
Contrast the above to a good e-mail or news client using a multi-column
list view, AKA a table control. The user may decide exactly which
columns of data are visible and which order they are presented in,
independently of the screen reader being used. Going through list items
is as easy as using the arrow keys, which are easier to press than tab
and shift+tab quickly. FOr each list item, all columns in a row are read
automatically, in stead of me having to put continuous, manual effort
into reading through the columns. Both discrete and continuous
selections have a dedicated keyboard interface. To process a list of
messages I can simply hold down shift and cursor through the list, back
up a message when the next interesting one comes about, and do something
to the whole selection, starting another one by cursoring without any
modifiers. navigation commands are also more efficient with direct
support for skipping pagefuls of items, or to either end or navigating
to any list item by typing in a substring prefix of its left most column
such as the subject line.
Client programs make searching easy, too. One can easily find messages
based on a substring match in any important message attribute, work with
the result set like any other message list and also have all kinds of
fancy sorting and filtering rules for power users. In contrast the IE7
search on a Web page is inaccessible in the sense of it being hard to
find the matched position. And find in VF to me is both slow and has no
visual interface for magnification users. It is also screen reader
specific. If forums offer searches, you'll have to find the field first
and even so often search results are not added in a new window or tab,
unlike in many e-mail and news clients, which sometimes makes you lose
your position before the search. Quite often search results cannot be
worked with like any other messages, either.
Finding the actions you can perform in a particular Web page say for the
selected messages is non-trivial. The reason is that both links that
have to do with message views and those that are actions are in one,
horribly long, sequentially navigable list with no perceivable structure
within the navigation links. Often tab indeces are not overridden on
sites to make navigation efficient, and evene if they are, VF doesnt
respect those overrides. Sure there are link lists that do help
navigation but they are reader specific and modal dialog boxes that
distract you from browsing the Web page. THere's no easy way to cancel
back to where you were in VF, either. Some sites do try to offer more
structure by adding headings to categorize links and a skip navigation
link to get to actual page specific data, but especially the former is
comparatively rare still. while links can have accesss keys, Sn doesn't
announce the keys by default, they are hard to discover and recall
quickly and besides access keys tend to clash with either menu mnemonics
in the browser or screen reader hotkeys.
Mail and news clients are yet again quite different. Major controls such
as multi-column list views and trees are single items in the tab order
and so you cannot easily accidentally navigate out of them. apps tend to
prefer deep hierarchical structures that are relatively workable on the
keyboard where as Web pages are often very broad and shallow, which
might be better for mouse usage. In mail and news clients, all commands
are neatly grouped into menus which are hierarchical or context
sensitive and logical. If I right click on a bunch of messages with the
app key, I am offered only the commands that are meaningful in the
current situation, unlike on the Web. As far as hierarchical menus go,
first you select a menu and then an item in that menu. This is
preferrable to a long flat navigation list box that some Web pages use.
Keyboard accelerators are also read automatically in the menus, their
navigation wraps around to be more efficient and you can even have the
underlined mnemonics announced with a bit of verbosity tweaking.
Since mnemonics can be unique within a menu the chances of being able to
assign meaningful mnemonics to menu items are higher than those for
links, and thus the user interface is much easier to remember and
navigate quickly. I generally have a very poor memory for arbitrary
hotkeys that are based on numbers or letters with no clear mnemonic
association to command words. Not being a native English speaker
mnemonics for English words that aren't the first letter of each word
are particularly hard to recall. I tend to prefer a series of mnemonics
to an accelerator command and mail andn ews clients support that, unlike
Web pages. For instance I prfer the command alt+m, c, i for modify,
case, invert compared to ctrl+k for the same thing, I also recall a
minimal amount of screen reader commands since they are more or less
arbitrary with the spatial layout of the numpad and meanings assigned to
modifier keys being the only guiding principles out there. I don't
recall that numpad 6 reads the whole line since I don't have to. Knowing
that when you navigate units larger than lines the line you land on is
read being sufficient knowledge. Reading the current line then is just
landing on the line that you are with up/down or symmetrically down/up,
and you can synthesize and reason about the command with little memory
load and total screen reader independence. The fact that menus do wrap
and that some menus are sorted alphabetically also helps plentifully. If
I know that I'm looking for a command called delete I can reason that I
should start cursoring down rather than up the menu, as delete is liekly
to be in the first half of it. BEcause of wrap around, the maximal
distance for reaching any item is 1/2 N out of N items if you do know
the direction, and often you can do even better.
Another classic case in which Web keyboard navigation is dismal would be
tree structures such as those used to group discussions into threads in
forums. Most of the Web trees I've seen don't route the focus back to
the item being expanded or closed. It does mean that you'll hav to
cursor from the top of the page to the oepn tree branch, which is a lot
of totally redundant and highly frustrating effort. Where as if people
bothered to add a line or two of JavaScript to give the recently opened
or closed branch the keyboard focus, that would help immensly.
Again tree controls in desktop user interfaces are much better. They
support similar type ahead navigation to any lists and the focus is
moved from an opened branch to its child directly. You can also move to
the parent node with the left arrow (close branch) or backspace (leave
it open) to mention a few hotkeys. Many trees also have other advanced
commands such as opening or closing all tree branches at once.
Even reading messages is harder on the Web than it would be in mail and
news apps. Several things contribute to this. One is that unlike on the
Web many e-mail clients have a dedicated cursor that you can move
through the message screen reader independently, easily and snappily
with no reader specific mode switching at all. Another thing is that
desktop apps show the messages in a single field that is easy to
navigate and copy the whole message from as plain text. Where as most
forum views I know on the Web mix the message text with site navigation
and commands such as reply to sender or report post. This makes both
navigation more demanding and it also prevents you from easily copying
just the message text.
Sometimes, though not always, Web forums make quoting less perceivable
than e-mail clients. The cases in which formatting or spacing shows
quoting, and that formatting might not be screen reader perceivable by
default, are particularly problematic. They also prevent you from
searching the next unquoted passage in a plain text copy of the message.
I do that a lot in e-mail using my text editor's regular expression
capability, which along with Perl, is one of the few Unixisms I
genuinely love. Again this is something that the screen reader or
browser specific finding commands don't support.
Another favorite nag of mine is that Web pages are very complex, screen
readers have to screen scrape content from them using browser specific
automation commands and so on, so cursoring round a plain text copy of a
message is a lot snappier than any reasonably complex WEb page in VF
would be. I detect a clear latency which is annoying, even on a machine
with two fast CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM. I've found that the
responsiveness of speech is a key factor that affects how fast a machine
feels like no matter how fast it can actually do processing other than
speech or navigating around. Most sample playback speech synths also
have perceivable lag especially if you quickly interrupt the speech on a
redundant passage, which I do all the time. So when there's lag,
navigation that relies on frequent interruptions of the speech suffers
especially badly. Without regular expression searches, finding the next
unquoted line is like that, and sounds like greater than some quoted
line, greater, greater, gray, gray, gray, gra gra gra gra blank aha,
we're there.
My last objection to Web forums is the use of glorified standard text
boxes for message editing. They don't support advanced navigation in
text such as control+up/down for next and previous paragraph, which you
can use in rich text edit areas and many editors, not to mention my
beloved regular expression searching. Also ctrl+del doesn't delete the
next word right to the cursor like it logically should, since
ctrl+backspace deletes the previous word. I usually replace a word by
ctrl+shift+left and then typeover, however, as you first hear a
confirmation of what you have selected before you delete it.
There are a lot of forum specific formatting such as quotes and smilies
and often these are kept in a toolbar that is not really keyboared
accessible at all or spoken by SN. YOu can also try to manually lern yet
another forum specific mini markup language, TM <ironically>, which is
not a highly reusable skill, though, due to heavy variance. Where as in
mail and news apps I can add greater than signs easily manually or even
programmatically using simple menu commands such as e-mail quote and
unquote or again regular expression replacing. Text editors also support
features important for program code in blind programming such as auto
indent, match brackets, rapping to a particular width and converting
tabs to spaces in code. Finally, as a magnification user text editors
offer user customizable color schemes, where as most text fields in Web
sites go by browser colors that are by default borrowed from Windos and
are dark on light with a light on dark selection.
Finally I would not want to type in a very long e-mail such as this one
in a Web forum directly. SHould I accidentally nnavigate to another
page, get a timeout on submitting the post, do a lot of mistakes that
aren't reversable by a single level undo, or should the machine crash,
everything would be lost. In contrast a good text editor or e-mail
client, I think, offers multi-levle undo, auto save and draft files on
disk. Additionally, many offer multiple tabs. So when I reply to a top
posted message, as top posting is a de facto standard even in blind
programming, I make two copies of the post in separate tabs and then
switch between the one on top of which I'm writing, and the other, so
that I don't have to constantly jump around the message to refer to
what's being said earlier or go by memory. Multiple tabs are handy, too,
if I need to merge several people's comments in a single reply post
among a great many other things such as taking notes based on a text.
Well hope you are able to offer some accessibility tips, Web forum
client programs or alternatives to usenet news. I do hope this has been
a thought provoking read as well, since you've made it this far.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vta...@mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila
Brian Gaff
Well, I can only agree, think what its like for mr mrs average who has no
programming knowledge and cares not to have to have special modes invoked
and just wants to ask a question and get a reply. No way jose. I do not know
of anyone who is not computer geeky like me, who would waste more than a
couple of minutes on a web forum.
This is why we must keep news alive I feel. Its like email, and the general
blind public have a bigger incentive and need to learn how to manage this,
so its not that hard to do news.
Unless something changes, I cannot see us using web based forums, certainly
the only time I go near them is when I need to find an answer to something,
and I'm hoping that someone else has asked the same question, so I fiddle
with google and see if anything comes up.
I mean its just getting ridiculous with bot spotting graphic letters. I have
a friend who is sighted, and he has often to ask the sites to send another
selection as he has no idea what its supposed to be. Another gripe is the
sites which say they have a spoken version, but then hide the link as a
cryptic filename, rather than voice version.gif as one might expect.
Another still is the use of a wheelchair for this function. Gmail did
someone mention gmail?
No, forums have one other problem you have not mentioned, well its two
problems.
Firstly, for all those conspiracy theorists, the forum is locked to a site.
If its a forum about anything that might be considered risqué or adult or
even political, it can, had some have, been shut down. This does not occur
on news.
Then there is the unwelcome site redesign every six months for no particular
reason which makes all learned work arounds redundant at a stroke. Anyone
mention Amazon?
We have to face the facts here. We are, in effect a different species, one
which has no eyes, and our culture is a subculture. Blind is the new black!
Did i just pinch that slogan? *grin*
Brian
--
Brian Gaff....Note, this account does not accept Bcc: email.
graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email: bri...@blueyonder.co.uk
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Tiddy Ogg
<Bri...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
...a desperate plea for usernet, with which I wholly agree.
The only forum I use is one attached to a game. It took me a while to
figure it all out but now, with Jaws' features can do most things on
it, except drag and drop smileys, which is a triviality... but even
so, it is messy.
Tiddy Ogg.
http://www.tiddyogg.co.uk
Veli-Pekka Tätilä
I also use a gaming related forum at:
http://www.game-accessibility.com/
And can do that OK, though I read and reply in a plain text editor, use
nor or little markup and only paste as needed. In stead of navigating
through the forum interface, I have bookmarks to threads I follow and
e-mail notification.
which brings me to technical features I like that forums do have but
usenet doesn't:
One of them is the flat view of a discussion. In many simple threads,
that don't branch into many subtopics, it is very useful to have the
whole discussion in a single document with posters clearly marked up in
text. in many fora the culture is to quote little or nothing at all and
rely on the previous text, and perhaps letter-like summaries?, to
counter this. It works quite well with speech, too, apart from finding
the next post. FOr that in the accessible games forum, for instance, I
use the regular expression:
^#\d+\s.+\R\w+
In a plain text copy. It reads you the sender name and the post is SOME
FIVE lines down from that. The actual passage this regexp highlights,
whose last line is read, is like this:
#5 2007-02-17 13:51:49
vtatila
AS to the regexp it is in English:
Find at the beginning of a line a hash sign and some digits 0 to 9, as
many as you can, and a space and as many as you can non-new lines, and a
line break and as many as you can word characters in a-zA-Z0-9_ which is
what most poster names are made up of.
Another advantage of the flat view, apart from quoting culture, is the
fact that when I come in on a thread I generally read it through in one
sitting, skipping quotes, and this flat view makes the thing an
automatic process. It is equivalent to logical depthfirst navigation in
a threaded tree structure, for which WIndows offers no simple hotkey,
requiring you to memorize the tree level, check if there are branches,
and expand and move to children and along siblings manually. This isn't
easy in Netscape Communicator 4.8's custom trees which I use as I won't
use OE for the quoting bug, and Thunder Bird is not supported by SN,
sadly.
Where the flat views fail are in complex discussions that clearly have
separate sub topics which are just mixed in a temporal order in a flat
view. For that, separate threads or a tree structure, whose HTMl
keyboard usability is bad as I said, can be used.
Another thing I like in forums are posting stats. ALthough a bit
redundant, it is nice to know where people are from without spawning
threads about it, how long or numerously they have posted to spot the
regulars, and linking to Web sites can eliminate having to repeat the
info in a signature.
And then there's markup. I generally don't like it very much but if done
well, it is speech friendly and the markup is easy listening and nice to
maintain by hand. I still don't use much emoticons, and dislike when
people use them in pure ASCIi with speech (commenting d to you as well,
when a friend of mine postts :D). HOwever, a forum eliminates this
problem. They use images in the text but these images have alt text and
are for all intents and purposes like textual emoticons such as <happy>,
and there are many of them, perhaps too many. Also quoting and linking
are marked in the forum post unambiguously so technically the way in
which quotes are shown to the user could be made speech friendly with
ease. e.g. rendering the quoted markup in a message text as:
quoting Veli-Pekka Tätilä
some text
End quote.
The ability to markup links is also very useful, I recall some e-mail
clients having real trouble in trying to use links from the keyboard,
and constructs like Package::Name may be accidentally highlighted as
links, when this process is automated in an e-mail client.
Last but not least one great feature is automatic notification of
replies with the text already quoted in the mail, so that the forum need
only be revisited for replying. This is far preferrable to having to
manually check whether all the threads you've subscribed to have unread
messages at the bottom, or think as a blind person, umm what things have
I marked as read, by accident, and how do I get back to these.
All this still doesn't really mean I've change my opinion of the forums.
I'm just adding stuff that I do enjoy in them and which sshould be in
news killer applications. I should have mentioned this earlier in my
gargantuan root post, too, to be fairer to forums.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vta...@mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila
Brian Gaff
viewdata response frames on prestel. There were always characters we could
test for to know where to place the cursor before sending the text. The old
Sinclair Spectrum could do all this and more, and yet people played games
on it.
The problem on the internet is tthe lack of a standard,otherwise it would be
fairly easy to automate it all, but of course this is just what the spammers
try to do...
Brian
--
Brian Gaff - bri...@blueyonder.co.uk
Note:- In order to reduce spam, any email without 'Brian Gaff'
in the display name may be lost.
Blind user, so no pictures please!
"Veli-Pekka Tätilä" <vta...@mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote in message
news:47876AD3...@mail.student.oulu.fi...
Andrew Hodgson
<vta...@mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:
>Hi,
>Here are some generalized and very frustrating accessibility issues I
>continuously run into in Web forums (or fora if you will). This is just
>my opinion, and I don't deal with what's good in forums much, such as
>the flat view with minimal quoting in threads, so your mileage may
>definitely vary. Still I bet a number of legally blind Web users feel
>the same as I do and I'd welcome any comments to improve matters
>accessibilitywise, too. Note that this is an edited repost to Dolphin
>Users, but I thought it might be potentially interesting reading here as
>well. My core questions are:
>
>Are there technical or spiritual successors to usenet news out there
>which might become main stream?
Not that I know of, but I am wondering whether anything will happen
with RSS and possibly putting a forum poster into some RSS readers,
and allowing the users to pull the feeds of the relevant topics etc.
Another idea I have on occasions is to create a Gmane style service,
but pulls from the forums rather than lists.
>
>Which Web forum platforms are the most keyboard accessible?
I prefer PHPBB myself, the worst ones I have come up against this
month are at http://forums.jhsoft.com, which uses software I have
never seen. The problem is that people redesign the pages, and quite
often there is so much in the pages that it gets removed, and so the
various bits you use for helping you find your way around gets moved
or removed, so one PHPBB forum could be subtly different to another.
>
[...]
>
>Although Ive been using Supernova for 10 years, computers even longer
>and know plenty about WIndowes and programming, I still find that Web
>fora present major accessibility issues and so I use them only when no
>alternative medium exists. This in turn means I feel kinda left out from
>main stream activities, since a lot of the old usenet news groups are
>dead and many new topics don't receive newsgroups at all. Mailing lists
>are OK, too, but compared to news you'll have to receive all mail, of
>which about 5 to 10 % I read, and finding and subscribing to mailing
>lists is much clumsier than for a news group. Web forums seem to be the
>average Joe's discussion medium on the Inet these days, and many new
>users have never even heard of the news, and find e-mail spam-driven and
>antiquated. Forums are also technically more advanced in that they
>support proper user profiles, access from anywhere, threading on the
>server side in stead of the client program, flat views to discussions,
>lots of smilies and other semantic markup and better moderation, to
>mention but a few things.
Well whilst I am finding that Usenet is mainly dying these days, there
are hot spots of activity, specifically in the UK groups, and a lot of
people use the microsoft.* groups. If you want hard cord developer
discussions, then I always turn to mailing lists, and the likes of
Freelists and Google groups have allowed a lot more lists to be
created - as ten years back it was technically a lot of work to set
one up. I think that is one reason the forums are so popular - you
just set them up on your already running web server, inside your own
website/domain etc.
However, with the simplistic nature does come some interesting issues
- the lack of real quoting styles - which mean that it is difficult to
follow the discussion/thread, especially if the discussion is
long/involved, the fact you get several people posting the same things
over again - even though with a forum, there is a search facility that
allows you to search, in most cases, from the topics discussed on day
one, and the fact you have to give personal details to several
places/forums rather than just pull from one source.
Andrew.
J. P. Gilliver (John)
<vta...@mail.student.oulu.fi> writes
>Hi,
>Here are some generalized and very frustrating accessibility issues I
>continuously run into in Web forums (or fora if you will). This is just
. Basically, I agree with you that (a) web fora are a poor substitute
for proper news and (b) newsnet probably is dying - certainly most new
users I know aren't even aware it exists, and several UK ISPs have
discontinued their news service. (Yes, I know about third party servers
- I have a subscription to Teranews myself.) .
. However, I'm afraid I don't have the time to go through your decidedly
lengthy post! So just one or two things: .
[]
>accessibilitywise, too. Note that this is an edited repost to Dolphin
>Users, but I thought it might be potentially interesting reading here as
. (Wow, how long was the original?) ..
[]
>dead and many new topics don't receive newsgroups at all. Mailing lists
>are OK, too, but compared to news you'll have to receive all mail, of
>which about 5 to 10 % I read, and finding and subscribing to mailing
>lists is much clumsier than for a news group. Web forums seem to be the
. Turnpike can (provided they adhere to certain minimal standards)
present mailing lists in the same way it presents news, including
threading, expiry, and so on. There may be other clients that can do
this too, I don't know. ..
[]
>Another favorite nag of mine is that Web pages are very complex, screen
. Agreed - needlessly so, of course; however, that applies to many (I'd
even say the majority of) web pages in general. ..
[]
>My last objection to Web forums is the use of glorified standard text
>boxes for message editing. They don't support advanced navigation in
. They often don't even work properly with browsers other than IE
(assuming they do work properly for IE, which I rarely use unless I have
to), even for a sighted person. ..
[]
>Finally I would not want to type in a very long e-mail such as this one
>in a Web forum directly. SHould I accidentally nnavigate to another
>page, get a timeout on submitting the post, do a lot of mistakes that
. The timeout problem (or similar problems) occur with messages much
shorter than this one!
[]
>disk. Additionally, many offer multiple tabs. So when I reply to a top
>posted message, as top posting is a de facto standard even in blind
. Top posting is lazy posting - as is bottom posting. A proper followup
should leave in only sufficient (though not less than that) of the
original message to make it clear the point that the poster is following
up. I am inclined to think that this leads naturally to bottom posting
(as in the case of the post you are now reading), but either way,
insufficient (or occasionally excessive) snipping is the main sin,
rather than top or bottom posting. ..
[]
>Well hope you are able to offer some accessibility tips, Web forum
>client programs or alternatives to usenet news. I do hope this has been
>a thought provoking read as well, since you've made it this far.
>
. Well, I think usenet news is still better than all the alternatives,
and as one of the other posters has said, it's still quite active in
places; he said particularly in the UK hierarchy, which I can't comment
on, other than that at least one of the very high traffic groups I take
(a uk.media one) is there. I tend to agree it probably is dying, but -
like amateur radio - has a good deal of life left in it (in fact I'd say
more than ham radio).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G.5AL(+++)IS-P--Ch+(p)Ar+T[?]H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
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