On Wed, Jun 25, 2003 at 07:28:16AM +0800, William Kenworthy wrote: > This comes up regularly, and if memory serves me correctly, top posting > is actually the more correct method by history, but not by much
Dunno about your memory, but "bottom posting" has been netiquette since DARPAnet and UUCP days. As far as I know "top posting" only became popular with the advent of Outlook as an email client (possibly other PC mail clients as well). Evolution has all the features of Outlook, but I'd be hard pressed to call "top posting" a feature I'd want anyone to emulate. I believe internet Email pretty much started in the Multics/Unix/VMS world (DARPA and USENET). I think even IBM PROFS and other mainframe mail systems also held to the "quoted text, then reply" model (which fits nicely with the left-to-right, top-to-bottom model of English text parsing that human readers have become accustomed to over the centuries). The "more correct method by history" argument just doesn't hold water. > It can create an almost religious argument - live and let live please! Says the person redirecting "bottom posting" to /dev/null? It's simply good manners to edit out unrelated text that you are quoting in a reply -- whether "top posting" OR "bottom posting". USENET news posting tools used to very sensibly reject posts with too much quoted text relative to new content (good ones still do for that matter). In my experience it is EXTREMELY rare to find a "top poster" that deletes ANY of the quoted text following their new material -- each post in a thread getting successively longer and longer. I've never seen a long thread that hasn't had multiple points and counterpoints -- quoting everything every time is ridiculous in an archived mailing list (and believe me, EVERY mailing list is archived by at least one member). So if anyone insists on "top posting" then fine. Just please, PLEASE only include the quoted text that is really necessary for context (and only that text!). Kudos for deleting some of the quoted text in your message. Not to nit-pick, but your post might have provided better context if you'd quoted just Collins Richey's text and deleted everything else (instead of the other way around). As it is the quoted text in your message was probably not read by anybody -- why include unnecessary quoted text at all? Regards, -- Rex -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
