21 Oct
2011
21 Oct
'11
1:18 p.m.
On Oct 21, 2011, at 3:50 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Bottom posting requires coscientious trimming of
quoted material.
Top posting encourages leaving an archive of everything that has been said
since the last time that somebody trimmed.
Exactly the argument I hear every time. It's not that I disagree, I just forget who
prefers what. :-)
In any case, I've existed on plenty of lists that get rather snippy (har har) about
untrimmed top-posting (misc at openbsd.org, in particular, is not a place where you want
to be a slow learner). I'm pretty sure I'll remember better once I'm in the
swing of things.
Accordingly the terminally clueless (such as college
administators) who
will never learn simple etiquette of trimming, need to be on top-posting
systems. Note that Outhouse (and State Farm's Clueless Messaging) push
top-posting.
Indeed. Apple's Mail.app allows a selection of either, though it doesn't have any
functionality for doing it per-list (which might be some complicated AI anyway). Where I
work (engineering), it's a combination of incompetence (which is rife amongst our
customers) and the desire to have the entire conversation in the message so that you can
basically forward the whole thread on to someone instantly. Gets used maybe 1e-12 percent
of the time.
- Dave