Re: Top posting (a different point of view)
On Thu, 9 Jun 2005 20:10:35 -0400, Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@gmail.com> said:
> I completely agree. ...
Hmm. What do you agree with? Are you agreeing that top posting sucks,
or that top posting is good? Well to figure that out, I would need to
either scroll down to look at the post that you're replying to
(fortunately, my mail reader shows be about 50 lines of the message, so
I actually didn't have to scroll) or try to figure it out from the rest
of what you write (fortunately, your next sentence makes it clear, but
that doesn't happen all the time for everyone, and besides, I don't like
being confused after reading the first sentence of a message and having
to wait until the second sentence to figure out what's going on).
Do you see why it's nice to have the context provided immediately? With
a bottom-posted message, I can quickly scan the original message and
recall the context that I had read before. If I have to scroll to see
the reply (which should be very rare, if quoted text is trimmed
properly), I just have to hit [space] once or twice, and I can easily
tell when I've reached the reply because my mail reader colours quoted
text.
With a top-posted message, I read the first sentence, get confused,
scroll down to read the context, then scroll back up to read the rest of
the reply.
Top posters also tend to have the horrible habit of not trimming the
original message to only what's relevant...
> ... I have my email ordered most-recent-first, and it saves me a _lot_ of
> time, whether the individual emails are top- or bottom-posted! ...
I have my mailing lists threaded, and it's nice to be able to just read
the first message in a thread and tell my mail reader that I'm not
interested in the rest of the messages in the thread. I can't imagine
how you would do that with most-recent-first. If you just read the
latest message in a thread and find that you're not interested, you
can't just kill the thread because you don't know if that message is off
on a tangent, or if you really aren't interested in that thread.
--
Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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