Re: Top posting (a different point of view)
Is it really necessary to get so exercised about top- vs bottom-posting?
On 6/10/05, Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Jun 2005 20:10:35 -0400, Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@gmail.com> said:
[...]
> 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.
My usual practice, actually, is to edit and interpolate, as if we were
having a conversation.
[...]
> Top posters also tend to have the horrible habit of not trimming the
> original message to only what's relevant...
That's a different issue.
> > ... 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.
You do it your way. I'll do it mine. OK with you?
I bottom post in this forum (mostly) because it's the norm here;
etiquette probably requires that we accommodate the lowest common
denominator. But don't get all righteous about it, for heaven's sake!
Patrick
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