[Asterisk-Users] Top posting

Joe Greco
Thu, 11 Nov 2004 05:59:24 -0000

Hello,

> I must admit I live in perpetual fear of forgetting to switch of html or
rtf formatting (useful for work) and top posting.  I can understand the issue
with the former but can see absolutely no reason why top posting is such a
problem.  In fact I'd far prefer it.  I get to my e-mail in batches and
bottom posting means I've got to wade through stuff I've just read.  I
totally agree with snipping extensively.
>
> So that I can understand the almost religious fervour on this point could
someone please explain to me why top posting is so hated!!

Because it's rude to assume that your post must be so important to everyone
else that we will all take the time to try to determine the context in which
you are making your reply.  Top posters force people to page up and down
through a message in order to determine the context.  And while it may be
stuff that *you* have just read, mail does not necessarily arrive in the
same order for everyone else, so the replied-to message may not yet have
been seen by other participants.

Inline quoting allows you to visually skip the quoted material fairly easily
(and many participants will do exactly that) *unless* one wants to find out
context, which I personally find myself wanting to do maybe a quarter of the
time.

Top posting makes it impossible to reply to relevant parts within context:
you've destroyed the context by doing so.

Properly quoted inline text is handled very nicely by good mail clients,
colored and highlighted appropriately so it is trivial to see, visually,
what is going on.

Top posting makes you look like a Microsoft-software-using weenie that is
not aware of basic Internet etiquette and who is too lazy to be bothered
to conform to basic community standards.

Many people, myself included, will simply ditch your message if it becomes
too hard to place your message in an appropriate context.  I personally
follow the "spacebar rule" at least 95% of the time...  within Elm, I
use
the space bar to progress through mailing list traffic, and that means we
only move forward through the text, unless something is /so/ compelling
and interesting that it warrants further examination.

> I can understand that if you are responding to multiple points in an e-mail
then you should reply below each point snipping out what is irrelevant to your
reply in the original e-mail.  If you're responding to an entire e-mail then
the proper approach to my mind would to do as you would in business letters and
start with a short paragraph explaining what you're doing (e.g. "In
response to Fred's e-mail about AMD MP motherboards and interrupts,
...".  I guess most of us are too lazy to do this so we just leave the
original text in the e-mail.  If we're really lazy we don't snip the
irrelevant stuff out.

E-mail is intended to be an easy and informal method for information
interchange.  We already have a method for providing context, which works
without having to summarize someone else's message, and which works through
multiple layers of reply (which summarization fails to do concisely).  You
are *supposed* to be "lazy" and make use of this more intelligent
mechanism,
which good software will actually use in order to highlight text based on
context, etc.

> Am I missing something totally?!   I'm just about to go and get my flak
jacket and helmet in anticipation of the responses. :)

Wrap your darn lines at 70.  ("rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat", hope you're
wearing
that flak jacket!  ;-)  )

This turns out to be a basic netiquette issue for all the people who have
joined the 'net.  We did things a little differently in the days of
BBS's
(though we used in-line message quoting!) but most of us who joined from
that community were able to adapt and work with the accepted netiquette of
USENET and the Internet.  It seems to be mainly the people who joined after
the "endless september" (Google) that have felt that it is more
appropriate
for the Internet to reshape itself to their own convenience.

... JG
--
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance
[and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on
e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many
apples.