On 5/29/07, Ben Kim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Sounds very archaic, but if I read mails with dumb terminals (baud rate 2400 bps), and if I am not familiar with the subject of the thread, top posting would be painful. It would especially be so to whoever has the honor of answering most of the questions on the list... But other than that, most of the times, I find bottom posting more inefficient. It feels like when I grade a student's report where the questions are mixed with answers and they are not quite visually separated. (On pine, they are not...) When I know what the question was, I come to wish that I had answers at the top, rather than having to page down several times to read the whole. At the same time, sometimes a nicely matched q & a sorted in order saves me time... especially when I search old archives.
You just illustrated the 3rd posting style, the "clear-posting" style. It has certain advantage over top-posting and bottom-posting. "Clear-posting" is fundamentally clean, space-efficient and free of top/bottom biases. But wrt top-posting vs bottom-posting. There is additional parameter that affect readabiltiy even more than top/bottom. It's number of past accumulated tails that you leave in the quotes. Some people do not cut away any past tails. After 4-5 levels of nesed quoting, this becomes unreadable both in top-style and in bottom-style. I cut away all but last 3 level of past quotes, and then I shorten them by dropping the greetings, the signature and irrelevant part. Shortness of quotes makes for for readabilty of the response. Multiple levels of fossilization make replies less readable, not the top/bottom difference. Yakov
