Chen wrote regarding '[EE] Top-posting, is it really that bad?' on Thu, Nov 24 at 21:07: > Actually I am using Outlook 2000 at work and it is > very hard for me not to top-posting when using You need to say no more. I use Outlook 2K at work and understand how difficult it is to bottom-post (and trim). I hate Outlook, and that's one of the big reasons. It makes replying a big pain in general. I wish the mail admins would just enable IMAP in Exchange so I could use a good mail program... > Should the anti-top-posting sentiment just be history? > Or is it still justified by some engineering/scientific > reasoning? This has been debated to death everywhere, but just to rehash it once more... :) On a mailing list, where the threads aren't all in the main place where things are read and messages can potentially be dropped or received out of order, it's useful to have context with the message. Only useful context should be included. If context is useful, it's generally useful to read in order. Therefore, bottom posting 1) allows context to be included in order and 2) allows readers who don't care about the context to quickly scan to the end of the message and read just the new part. With top posting and context, the reader needs to scroll to the end, find the beginning of the lowest included part, scroll back down while reading, scroll up to the second included part, scroll down to read it, scroll up to the top of theenext step, scroll down, and generally suffer through a big pain just to get up to speed with the current message. So, if we accept that including context in a reply is good, then bottom-posting makes the most sense. Remove context, and there's no difference between top- and bottom-posting. "But I don't like scrolling just to read the new content." Well, if the context is so annoying, delete it on replies. Top-posting is simply wasting bandwidth by including context which is nearly useless. Besides, only *relevent* context should be included, not the whole multi-page message being replied to. IMHO, of course. :) I'm partial to interlinear replies and/or trimmed bottom-posting replies because they only include as much context as is relevant, and all of the important text in a message is presented in an order which is most easily read. Other people - generally those new to the internet - may feel that wasting bandwidth and putting things in reverse order is the best choice, probably because that's the default for their mail program... Here's the first result for a Google search for "bottom posting": http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html Nearly all of the hits are pro-bottom posting. Now search for "Top Posting". Almost all are anti-top posting. I'm not generally one for bandwagon-style propoganda, but really, all those people probably aren't wrong. :) --Danny -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist