A Plea for sanity when posting to this list.

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Wed May 4 07:18:26 UTC 2005


On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 09:11:00PM -0400, Matt Galvin wrote:
>How? I find that having the most recent reply at the top of the
>messages makes it easy to find.

Hmm. I find it less convenient. Yes, the response is right there, in
your face, but the original text is at the bottom. This means having to
read the end of the email first, just to understand the response. In
short, top-posting promotes backwards reading habits (reading bottom to
top). I use a mail reader where commented text has a different colour
from the reply, so I can easily skip over old text if I'm familiar with
the discussion.

Top-posting also means that interspersing comments in the original text
(i.e. putting comments close to the text that insipred them) isn't done.

>Its right on top, right in your face where it should be. Newest
>content first so you can read whats new instead of having to find
>whats new. IMHO, I prefer it this way and so does Google(and MS, and
>Apple), in Gmail(i understand not everyone uses it)(and Outlook and
>Mail) when replying, the cusor is positioned at the very top of the
>message in order to top post/reply. IMHO evo is just backwards, which
>is part of why I personally don't use it anymore.

Are you seriously saying that top-posting is good because a few email
clients position the cursor above the commented text? I use an email
client where the cursor is put on the From: line, does that mean I
should put my comments in the email header? Are you too lazy to use the
arrow keys? ;-)

Of the email clients you mention I've only used Gmail and Outlook. AFAIK
Gmail positions the cursor at the top, but it still handles commented
text and its replies no matter where in the mail they are located.
Outlook just plain sucks! I top-post whenever I'm forced to use it (as I
do in Lotus Notes), bringing up Outlook in a serious discussion on email
clients is likely to have people run away screaming in disgust ;-)

You are of course free to top-post, and I am free to reply the way I
want. I write replies so that _I_ find them easy to read. I only reply
to emails I can read and understand, sometimes top-posts are easy to
read (yours was) but I find it to be more work to read long top-posts
and therefore often skip replying!

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org
http://magnus.therning.org/

Software is not manufactured, it is something you write and publish.
Keep Europe free from software patents, we do not want censorship
by patent law on written works.

You call it untidy, I call it LRU ordered
     -- Daniel Barlow
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