On 22 Jan 2007, john.l.meyer@gmail.com wrote:
If you want an alternative view, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Top-posting Charles philip Chan wrote:
I am not sure if it is saying any thing different: ,----[ Excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_posting ] | Partially because of Microsoft's influence, top-posting is more common | on mailing lists and in personal e-mail. Top-posting is viewed as | seriously destructive to mailing-list digests, where multiple levels of | top-posting are difficult to skip. The worst case would be top-posting | while including an entire digest as the original message. | | Some believe that "top-posting" is appropriate for interpersonal e-mail, | but inline posting should always be applied to threaded discussions such | as newsgroups. Objections to top-posting on newsgroups, as a rule, seem | to come from persons who first went online in the earlier days of | Usenet, and in communities that date to Usenet's early days. Among the | most vehement communities are those in the Usenet comp.lang hierarchy, | especially comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++. Etiquette is looser (as is | almost everything) in the alt hierarchy. Newer online participants, | especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend to be less | sensitive to arguments about posting style. `---- Please especially take note of the digest part- some people do choose to receive the postings as a digest. The page also contains this section with some choice quotes from RFC 1855[1]: ,----[ Excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_posting ] | In the words of RFC 1855, the RFC Netiquette Guidelines, which comprise | a comprehensive set of voluntary netiquette conventions: | | If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you | summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just | enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure | readers understand when they start to read your response. | | This section of the RFC is discussing public archived postings such as | mailing lists and newsgroups. For interpersonal e-mail, the subject line | is often sufficient to remind the sender of what was being discussed, | and no quoting of any type is necessary to indicate a reply. However, if | one is politely addressing points of a conversation, the points | discussed should be explicitly stated or quoted inline. This is stated | in the RFC regarding interpersonal communication such as email: | | When replying to a message, include enough original material to be | understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to | a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the | irrelevant material. `---- Charles Footnotes: [1] Netiquette Guidelines, http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html -- "MSDOS didn't get as bad as it is overnight -- it took over ten years of careful development." (By dmeggins@aix1.uottawa.ca)