On 11/26/05, Olin Lathrop <olin_piclist@embedinc.com> wrote:
> Changed tag to OT.
> > Or is it still justified by some engineering/scientific
> > reasoning?
>
> Mostly by common sense and plain courtesy.  Top posting may save you a
> second or two, but makes it annoying to read.  That's pretty arrogant and
> inconsiderate on a list like this where there are 1500 readers of every
> message.  When there are over 100 messages/day and many separate threads
> going on, many people aren't going to remember exactly what was said last
> that you are replying to.  Even if they remember every message, with so many
> things going on simultaneously plus the list server delays, it's not obvious
> at all what a bare reply is replying to.  If the context of a statement
> doesn matter, then you should delete the original message completely.
> However, most of the time it's needed for continuity, but of course that
> implies that it must be read *before* the reply.  That makes original first,
> then reply, the natural order.
>
> A: Top posters.
> Q: Who are the most arrogant people on email lists?
>
To be honest, I hate this long
A:
Q:
A:
Q:
thing to teach people not to top post. This is not top post. This is
the reverse order of "context posting" or "trim posting" or "interleaved
reply". It is more annoying to see this than to receiving email asking
one not to top-post.

http://www.lionsgrove.com/topposting.html
"This is usually followed by an insanely simple example which, incidentally,
could all use a bit of snipping for the "he wrote:, she wrote:, bob wrote:, god
wrote:" prefixes. Newsgroup posts are rarely that simple, at least from
what I've seen"

http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/top-posting.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting

Regards,
Xiaofan

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