Top Posting Was: Re: plaintext email?

Tue Jan 15 13:43:57 UTC 2019

Why must there be a hard rule about top posting?

If the replied to message(s) comprise a long logical sequence, the OCD among us experience cognitive dissonance if the order is “un-natural”. Thus bottom posting continues the “natural” sequence and makes life easier for many of us who otherwise would have difficulty maintaining context.

If a quoted message is concise, either by origin or by quoting only a salient point, top posting is not inappropriate. Context is nearby.

If the quoted message asks a series of questions, interspersed answers provide bottom posting on a per question basis which clearly indicates the relation of each reply segment to the appropriate segment.  Again, this assists many of us in maintaining context.

If the reply is done from a tiny-screen as on an iPhone, context of long messages is impossible to maintain and, anyway, top posting is the default.

This whole argument is analogous to rigorously not aligning braces in C code because Ritchie did it. Or rigorously aligning braces in C code to make comprehending easier.

This reply is deliberately top posted with the reference material as a short appendix. It is in plain text so rendering has no browser dependancies and the archived version remains readable.

James R. Cutler
James.cutler at consultant.com
GPG keys: hkps://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net

On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 8:39 PM <valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu <mailto:valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu>> wrote:
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 on usenet and in e-mail?

And now you're sitting here wondering what possible relevance that might have
to some line or other - the only context you have at this point is that it's a
reply to something you wrote. Actually, at this point you don't even have that.

So you may have read this entire thing and now you're still wondering what
possible relevance it may have to the thread.

On Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:24:30 -0500, bzs at theworld.com <mailto:bzs at theworld.com> said:
> Why dig through what you've already read to see the new comments?

Or you can put the comment after, so everybody who reads text top to bottom has
the context.  I'm not away of any languages or writing systems that work from
bottom to top, so that's pretty much everybody.  And if people trimmed the
quoted material so only the parts being replied to are left, there's not much
digging involved.

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