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On Thu, Nov 02, 2017 at 09:46:49AM -0400, Steven Mainor wrote:
> Can you explain what top-posting is? I am unfamiliar with that term.
Consider this reply to your question: Your question is above, my
reply is below. This is the customary way to do things in this
mailing list.
If the mail you are replying to is longer, you interleave your
answers at the appropriate places of the original -- liberally
snipping the original and only leaving what is needed to provide
context.
Instead, what you do is to include the whole original mail at
the bottom: this is perceived as somewhat useless over here,
because the original poster *has* a copy of the unabridged
original.
There's even a Wikipedia page [1] on it. What folks prefer
here is referenced there as "interleaved posting".
It seems to be a deep cultural thing: to see what feelings
top-posts elicit over here, cf. the jargon file [2].
Finally, and stolen from [3] (a worthy read in itself), that's
how we feel about top posts:
A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
Q: Why should I start my reply below the quoted text?
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: The lost context.
Q: What makes top-posted replies harder to read than bottom-posted?
A: Yes.
Q: Should I trim down the quoted part of an email to which I'm replying?
Hope that helps, a bit tongue-in-cheek ;-)
It's a bit more work for the writer, but considering that
the ratio of readers to writers is ~3000 to 1, it seems
to make sense.
Cheers
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
[2] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/top-post.html
[3] http://www.idallen.com/topposting.html
- -- tomás
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