Agreed! Marvin is a smart man. -----Original Message----- From: Marvin Johnston [mailto:marvin at rain.org] Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 12:55 PM To: ClassicCmp Subject: Re: Top Posting and Message Trimming Top posting makes sense in a number of instances, and just because something is the "norm" does not make it appropriate in all cases. When responding to a number of issues in a single post, top posting may be considered dumb, but when basically responding to one issue, top posting is appropriate. Top posting does NOT foul up the order people normally read text since prior messages have all the details and makes it far easier to follow the flow of an online conversation. If someone has a faulty memory, then the memory joggers can be found in the text below the post. I get far more annoyed at: 1) long posts with one liners inserted someplace. 2) not trimming out parts of a message not being responded to. 3) not changing the subject line to reflect the content. 4) not putting a space between the portion of the message being responded to, and the comments. The whole object of posting is communication, and the form used should be in a manner best suited to promote that communication.

Marvin Johnston wrote: That depends, too. At a typical screen size, most modern graphical email clients (displaying a folder view and message list as well as an individual message) only have room for about 20 lines of text in which to display a message. For many emails (I'd say most, at least for the typical ones I tend to get), when top-posting, the context all gets pushed off the bottom of the screen - the user still has to scroll to see the context before reading what the sender has written, so less scrolling only becomes a benefit in a top-posted environment for a narrow class of message. At least when bottom-posting, along with addressing points individually, the context and the response is all visible at once on the display. I really don't want to have to click, view and read every single past message just in order to get context, thank you very much! :) That's true whether using a threaded client or not. Out of interest, what do top posters do when they need to reply to an email and address several points? Most of the ones I see either: a) Only bother to reply to the first point and simply ignore the rest, b) Reply to all points, all in one enormous block of text. ... neither of which is actually useful :-( It seems the *only* place where TP works is for responses to very short messages containing only one point - and in that situation, bottom-posting does the job just as well, so you'd think people would us BP exclusively just to be consistent! Actually, that's probably people composing messages in HTML :-) cheers Jules