Dirk Gently wrote:
I never saw people top-post routinely before the widespread use of MS Outhouse.
Coincidence w/GUI's for reading email. I'd still be using it if it reliably supported IMAP, but it didn't (broke the protocol, leaving IMAP server in deadlock on a per-connection basis). That killed off Outhouse from Office97 -- up to 2002 when they went to multiple connections/IMAP server -- which mostly hid the problem (wasn't certain it was fixed, but was already using other readers then). Thing is, when you display a message, a GUI displays the 1st page(30-40 lines), but line-oriented readers will leave the last 25 lines of the message on the screen. For short messages, on line-oriented readers, it was more common to display the whole message than to type in the necessary filter option to display the message a page-at-a-time. Thus if you put new content at the end, and it was <~25 lines, the person saw the new content and could reply to it w/o redisplaying the message through a "pager". Most people today display email on a GUI and TTY's are only emulated for console-related work. I don't know of ANY email reader that displays the last page of an email, by default, when you display it. This means that if the new content isn't on the first page, people have to move off of the message selection interface over to the reading interface to adjust it.
Personally, I think top-posting impedes clear communication, because it completely discourages in-line comments among the lazy, who generally don't put much effort into communicating clearly to begin with.
---- Oh contrare! I favor top posting for short replies, but do inline comments as needed.
network security for one, is to top post, leaving the content below for reference as operationally needed. If you bottom-post and don't edit,
That, I think is a special case.
---- no more so than any professional field (doctors and lawyers, for example have always had top-posted charting). The earth is arranged with the most recent stuff at the top, archeologically speaking, and people's piles are organized the same way. Reading things from the last page first is consistent with the anachronistic TTY interface.
In general, I've yet to see anything outside of e-mail hold a convention of keeping records in reverse-chronological order, or that people are expected to review records in reverse chronological order.
---- See doctors, lawyers -- professional fields where time is money... Also it's a natural order. The thing is, the mail being responded to is a *courtesy*, to allow those tuning in to go back if they want. The alternative to not posting inline, and not top-posting, is to not give any context. Some people illogically think that email is a book organized for their benefit. If you have read all the stuff before, you don't want to read it again. If you are new to the conversation, you shouldn't expect that the entire conversation will be included, or require that people waste their time skimming through old content looking for the start of new.
the "meat" of the message can be difficult to find, but if you do edit, you can carve needed references, possibly then requiring searching through previous messages that might not even be available at that time.
---- The meat isn't hard to find if it is the first thing they see (i.e. on top). -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org