On Thu 9 June 2005 22:12, Paul Johnson wrote: > > You've been around too many Outlook Express and Outlook users, then. > Those are the only two clients that encourage top posting by default > and make you strain to post properly, instead of the other way > around.
Sadly, Novell GroupWise encourages (indeed virtually requires) top posting as does Netscape 7 (at least I think it does as I seem to get enough top-posted stuff from NS7 users). Novell GroupWise is particularly bad as it doesn't even have quote characters at the left of each line of quoted material so interspersed or bottom-posted replies are impossible as attribution becomes virtually impossible to discern. The only time when top-posting is equal (not superior - equal) to interspersed is under the following strict set of circumstances: 1. There is a single non-branching thread (so everyone responds to the last person who contributed). 2. The thread itself is a single topic - that is there is one question and one question alone. Moreover the answers don't themselves beget multiple questions. 3. All the posts are short one or two sentence replies. 4. The thread is short lived. Since this is unlikely most of the time interspersed is preferable. I've seen some doozies at work as a result of Novell GroupWise + top posting. One I remember well is when an exec asked something like 7 questions in one email. Each answer required at least a large paragraph and a few ran to 3 or 4. Clearly, top posting made no sense here (not least because the reply came several days later owing to the research required) yet that's what the software dictated. So what did she do? She copied the questions into WordPerfect, bolded them and proceeded to answer each one usenet-style (without even realizing it) question by question. She then attached the file to her reply which (top-posted of course) indicated to go see the attached file. The final irony here is that the exec reads his email on a Blackberry which for some odd reason can't read WordPerfect files so he had to get his admin to print it out for him. Now if they had been using a modern mailer and had a policy of interspersed replying in place this hassle would have been avoided. Most of the email conversations I see at work are complex enough that top-posting simply can't be justified yet we continue to use this backwards way of doing things. I've never understood the logic of top-posting in a corporate environment because of this. The only thing I can think of is that if the cursor is placed below the text the person probably won't trim unless they have been trained to. So what would result is miles and miles of quoted text with replies at the very bottom. Perhaps the cursor should be placed after the first paragraph of text to the left of the quote character. This would be an interesting area of usability study for new users who are not used to any particular way of doing things. -- David P James Ottawa, Ontario http://david.jamesnet.ca ICQ: #42891899, Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Noone isn't no one
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