On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Jim Giner <jim.gi...@albanyhandball.com>wrote:
> And besides - I'm sure there are PLENTY of people here who despise > scrolling > thru endless repeated paragraphs from a long list of posts just to get the > the latest contribution to the topic. :) > > This newgroup may have its rules, but if bottom-posting was such a wise and > preferred method, why do millions of business users subscribe to a product > such as Outlook, that top-posts by default, to conduct their daily business > via emails flying back and forth with the latest post at the beginning so > that readers don't have to re-hash old news unless they want to? If you're looking for a sane reason why Microsoft software is popular in the business world you're not going to find one. If you're looking for a logical reason it's simply because they built software that ran on the cheapest boxes available and then put a lot of money into marketing it. That doesn't make it good software, and it certainly doesn't give them any authority over the "right" way to do things. This mailing list requires selective quoting and bottom posting for the following reasons... 1) It provides context to that contributors' contribution without requiring the rest of the thread. 2) There is no second reason. That's it, and it's a strong argument. I use gmail for mailing lists and as such have access to the complete thread in a logical format. The most popular email clients don't feature decent threading, if any at all. Would you seriously rather wade through a date-sorted list to work out what the hell the latest email is talking about and responding to? As an example, your email to which I am replying starts "And besides..." Erm, besides what? While a stretch of an example I think it illustrates the point. In addition, these emails we send back and forth get archived on more websites than you know about, and they're usually near the top of results for any search you'll do for help with PHP. Upon visiting one of these results, is it more helpful for that single page to contain the relevant parts of the thread or do you really think it's better to have that page only contain that one post and links to the rest of the thread? If you really side with the latter, consider that a lot of the more useful threads on this list end up covering a number of different subjects in its various branches. Public archive requirements don't generally apply to business users - very few of them are generous/daft enough to publish their emails. It's also worth pointing out that for me, top posting in the business world annoys me just as must as bottom posting annoys you in this world. One final thing... you keep calling this a newsgroup. The PHP mailing lists are mailing lists first, and a newsgroup second - that's kinda why they're called the PHP mailing lists. -Stuart -- Stuart Dallas 3ft9 Ltd http://3ft9.com/
