Re: Top posting vs Bottom posting
On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 11:52:54 -0500, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > On 2009-03-22 11:45, Chris Bannister wrote:
> >>
> >> Bottom posting of course is just as bad or worse than top posting.
> >
> > The only person who can say that with a straight face is one who has spent
> > too much time using Windows.
> >
> > A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> > Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> > A: Top-posting.
> > Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
>
> This isn't true. Come enter the 21st Century, it started nearly a decade
> ago. ;-) Top posting works well in a modern threaded mail reader (all of
> which, incidentally, support HTML email). Because *you* are a curmudgeon
> doesn't mean everyone else has to be. ;-)
>
> Your example looks like this in a threaded mail reader:
>
> Mail 1: Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
> Mail 2: A: Top-posting.
> Mail 3: Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> Mail 4: A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read
> text.
Your argument assumes that all subscribers keep the older mails, or that
they remember the previous discussion. I don't think that this a valid
assumption for a high-volume mailing list with almost 3000 subscribers
and 80-100 messages posted on an average day.
> It looks no different than a discussion forum or other normal conversation.
> In fact, reading bottom-posted threads in a *modern mail reader* is
> annoying as it forces the reader to display a bunch of extraneous
> unnecessary text (the quoted material).
Maybe you should switch to a MUA that has a command to collapse quoted
text.
> I just read it in the previous
> post, I don't need to see it again.
I need to see the relevant context quoted (properly trimmed as the
discussion progresses, of course), especially if a thread has run for a
while. I simply do not have the time to search through the archive for
the background information that I would need to join an ongoing
discussion.
> I bottom-post out of force of habit, however, it's archaic and generally
> unnecessary.
For the reason outlined above, I think that replying inline with prudent
trimming of the older content is important on mailing lists like
debian-user. If you make it difficult for other people to follow the
discussion then you reduce your chances of getting good answers.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
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