On Sunday, October 13, 2002, at 10:58 AM, Thomas D. Kearns wrote: > On Sunday, October 13, 2002, at 11:51 AM, John Teffer wrote: >> In most newsgroups and mailing lists like this one, it's considered >> good >> form to reply beneath the quoted text, like I am doing here. > > I disagree. Posting underneath makes me crazy. Posters still forget > to > trim and you wind up scrolling down indefinitely. Also, since the > heading is the same, the reader should know what the topic is and my > preference is to see immediately what the poster is saying, except of > course when responses are intermixed...like I'm doing here. :) > >> 3. It will fix your problem with the signature. > > True. But I've always thought that "good form" was top posting or at > least very close to the top posting.
there's a really neat piece on the Jargon File website about the history of quoting in e-mail. read about it here: <http://info.astrian.net/jargon/How_Jargon_Works/ Email_Quotes_and_Inclusion_Conventions.html> The generally accepted (with enough exceptions to make the issue non-trivial) convention, in terms of order, is to reply beneath the quoted text. To those who've been reading and responding in this manner for years (upon years, upon years...), there develops an almost absolute tendency to autonomically skip over sections with succeeding levels of '>' markers. For someone like myself, for instance, who's been using e-mail and usenet since shortly before the dawn of the World Wide Web in the early 1990's, in reading my own message here, I barely even notice John Teffer's quote above (in fact, his text above only to illustrate my point), and I would only refer up to Thomas Kearn's quote if portions of my own post (supposing I were reading this as a recipient and not the author) only if something said seemed out of context or off-topic. To someone whose been following the thread from the beginning, it really is elementary; you tend to completely ignore all lines starting with '>' and skip to what you know to be new content. As someone joining the thread now, however, it tends to be easier to start at the top and read down ... that is, after all, how english is meant to be read. Most journals start with the oldest writing on the first page, after all. How much havoc would it cause if you tried to start reading my diary, and I'd started by writing on the LAST page of the book? -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
