Top Posting Was: Re: plaintext email?

Tue Jan 15 16:03:53 UTC 2019

Everyone processes information differently. There is no universal 'best
way' to format a message 'properly'. Everyone will have different
preferences based on their own experience and cognition.

No disrespect intended to anyone at all, but the pissing and moaning about
it is a massive waste of time and energy.

On Tue, Jan 15, 2019 at 8:46 AM James R Cutler <james.cutler at consultant.com>
wrote:

> 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> 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 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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