[cctalk] Re: TOP POSTING

[Kevin Anderson]

I used to be an ardent bottom-poster like this list requires, but then I was given one very good reason to switch that I believe is valid and persuasive -- bottom posting (and even inline posting), I understand, is a very royal pain in the arse for people who are visually disabled or challenged and require the use of assistance software.  

While this particular list may not have members who fall into this category (me included), in other realms that I frequent I there are readers who have these restrictions.  And for them I learned to top post.

I've adapted to top-posting and pretty much every other list I belong to generally works that way.  Top-posting makes sense (and can be efficient) when one is following a conversation from the beginning and only needs to quickly find the relevant new additions in each message.  But I agree that it is a royal pain in the arse when one jumps into the middle of an on-going thread, as reading backwards from the bottom is frustrating.

Top-posting is possibly part of the reason people have unlearned how to trim posts, as they rarely scroll far enough down into the e-mail to see the stuff that is still trailing along in the e-mail.

As a Digest reader for most of the forums and e-mail lists I subscribe, not trimming material is a far worse frustration than top- versus bottom posting.  I have no choice but to see all the untrimmed material over and over again as I scroll through the digest to find the start of the each message.

Equally bad are e-mail clients that don't effectively find a way to demark previous text being quoted by using > characters.  I think when top-posting became the rage, software developers for e-mail clients quickly ignored that important piece of effective e-mails because it became so easy to just slap in a horizontal line or some text like "---Previous Message---" and call it good. Even indents get lost in the translation of message between different e-mail clients.

For what my comments and observations might be worth.  I am only an occasional contributor on this particular list anyway, and so I will adapt to your requests so that I can remain a member. At least we aren't ALL SHOUTING AT EACH OTHER were we following the conventions of many systems of the eras that this list so often talks about, when upper-case only text was often the norm.

Kevin Anderson