Re: top post fixer?
On Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 07:56:23AM -0800, Francis Healy wrote:
It's not "in the event". You almost always need to trim your quotes.
Although response-before-reply quoting is itself often a pain to decipher,
my biggest beef with top-posting is that top-posters almost always just
throw some text in prior to the text they're responding to, then press
'send' without even thinking about trimming the quoted text. I suspect
that placing the cursor at the bottom instead of the top would only
encourage that sort of behaviour and make things even worse.
> If top posting is realy the bane of everyone's existance that certian
> voceriferous individuals claim it is, what is wrong with the mail client
> putting the cursor at the at the botttom of the reply and letting you
> move it up in the event you need to delete some irrelevant passage.
While you may disagree, most of us find it useful to see the *relevant*
context from the original message so that we know what the new one is
talking about. Especially on busier lists, it's easy to have enough
concurrent conversations taking place that it's impossible to know what
a post is talking about without that context.
Granted, context is much less of a concern when reading in threaded
mode within a single mail-reading session, but some blighted souls are
still using non-threaded MUAs, memory of the thread's content fades
when you move on to other threads (or, heaven forbid, non-email-reading
activities), and the context even changes to some degree when one branch
of the thread ends and you move into another. Threading alone is not
a complete solution to the problem of maintaining context.
> If I need to read the original post, I don't mind scrooling down.
As I've said above, "all the bile" is due to the combination of answer/
question format being tougher to decipher (as I hope this message
illustrates), top-posts requiring the reader to do more work to find
or remember the context of replies, and the vanishingly small number
of top-posters who even think about trimming their responses (and even
fewer who bother to actually do it).
> I see the point of placing the respone within the prior post if you
> are addressing a series of issues point by point, but I don't get all
> the bile that is spewed in the direction of top posters.
--
I would rather be exposed to the inconvenience attending too much Liberty
than those attending too small degree of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
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