Re: top posting

Thomas Hart wrote:

> I agree. Obviously there is convention, and I will post in the
> style generally accepted in the list, but to me it always made more
> sense to top post. If you're keeping up on the conversation, then
> the relevant information is right there, and if you weren't, it's
> not that difficult to go through and catch up (it's not like the
> lines are in reverse order, or the words spelled backwards or
> something).

You write "conversation" as if every message is written as a measured
response to all of the previous messages, with an absolute order
defined by when the messages arrive in my inbox, like we're all
carefully taking turns.  This is simply not true, especially when a
thread has many participants, with many messages flying past each
other - effectively, there are =many= interwoven conversations going
on.  Quoting the text to which you are responding is often the only
way to provide the necessary specific context for your comments.

As an illustration, which helps you understand the preceding
paragraph better, the extract above, or the mess below?

- John D. Burger
   MITRE

On Dec 11, 2007, at 11:54, Thomas Hart wrote:
> Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 08:43:44AM -0800, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>
>>> O.k. this might be a bit snooty but frankly it is almost 2008. If
>>> you
>>> are still a top poster, you obviously don't care about the people's
>>> content that you are replying to, to have enough wits to not top
>>> post.
>>>
>>
>> There are those who argue persuasively that emailing is more like
>> letter
>> writing than conversation, and that it is better to reply with one
>> single
>> set of paragraphs than with a set of replies interspersed with
>> quotes. Moreover, under such circumstances, it is utterly silly to
>> quote the entire
>> original argument first, because the reader then has to plough
>> through a
>> long block of reproduced content to get to the novel stuff.
>> On a mailing list, perhaps one can argue that the conventions
>> simply have to
>> be followed.  But I know I find it pretty annoying to get 36 lines
>> of quoted
>> text followed by something like, "No: see the manual, section x.y.z."
>>
>> I don't think top posting is always the crime it's made to be (and
>> I get a
>> little tired of lectures to others about it on these lists).
>>
>> A
>>
> I agree. Obviously there is convention, and I will post in the
> style generally accepted in the list, but to me it always made more
> sense to top post. If you're keeping up on the conversation, then
> the relevant information is right there, and if you weren't, it's
> not that difficult to go through and catch up (it's not like the
> lines are in reverse order, or the words spelled backwards or
> something).
>
> I have a great deal of respect for you Joshua, and you've helped me
> out of a jam more than once, but quite frankly, that is a bit
> snooty lol. Still, there is a convention here, and I can respect
> that, but please don't insult people who see the world in a
> different direction than you :-)
>
> Tom
>
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