Re: OT: Top Posting

[Nicolas George <george@nsup.org>]

Greg Wooledge (12024-05-14):
> Usenet news.  For people in this culture, there is a well-defined set
> of "netiquette" rules -- plain text messages, inline quoting with "> "
> citation characters, lines limited to ~72 characters, etc.

I slightly disagree with this wording: you make it sound like we follow
the rules just because they are there. Not so: we follow the rules
because they make sense, because they make conversations more fluid:

- Limiting to 72 characters was good because a lot of terminals were 80
  columns, and it is still good because longer lines are hard to read
  but mail software still is not smart enough to rewrap text by the mile
  but not code.

- Trimmed interleaved quoting presents to the reader the exact
  information they need in the order they need it to understand the
  reply and what it is about.

In summary, the hackers culture expects the sender to spend a little
effort into making the mail easy to read for the recipient(s) while the
culture of the general population expects the sender to make as little
effort as possible and the recipient(s) to bear the burden that the
software in between cannot take, i.e. most of it.

And the “(s)” tells us which culture is more efficient and why.

> The second culture are Windows users who grew up with Microsoft products
> in their school or workplace.  In this culture, top-posting is the norm,
> and inline quoting is nigh impossible.  Messages are often sent in either
> HTML or markdown format.

Messages in Markdown in the Windows world? I have never seen it.

> The best course of action in this case is to drop it

Indeed. But we can still discuss cultural issues relevant to
mailing-lists around it.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George