Re: Top posting (a different point of view)
On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 09:09:26 -0400, Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@gmail.com> said:
> My usual practice, actually, is to edit and interpolate, as if we were
> having a conversation.
(Did you mean interleave rather than interpolate?) Yes, that is the way
things should be. Anyone who bottom posts without appropriate trimming
or posts just a big block of text without proper interleaving also
should be taught how to reply correctly.
>>> ... 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?
Sure. I just wrote what I did because you brought up how you preferred
your way and that other people should try it, and I just explained why I
like my way. I really couldn't care less how you read your email.
> I bottom post in this forum (mostly) because it's the norm here;
> etiquette probably requires that we accommodate the lowest common
> denominator.
Sure. I'm not on any lists where top-posting is the norm, but when I
correspond with other people on a personal basis, where the thread has
no branches, and so it's easy to keep track of the conversation, I tend
to write like a regular letter -- the pen and paper kind. (Why bother
keeping the context at all when the recipient already knows it?)
> But don't get all righteous about it, for heaven's sake!
I don't believe I was. I was just trying to give reasons for why I
think that top-posting (in a mailing list context) is not a good thing
to do.
--
Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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