Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 09:10:31 +1030 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Joshua Lokken <bsdaemon@eudoramail.com> Cc: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Top posting Message-ID: <20030226224031.GL66520@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <NKCIBJDOKLMIHBAA@whowhere.com> References: <NKCIBJDOKLMIHBAA@whowhere.com>
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--oY1uq2ONqt5kuovO Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline X-Mailer: MailCity Service [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] single line paragraph On Wednesday, 26 February 2003 at 11:38:51 -0800, Joshua Lokken wrote: > Hey newbies > > Why do people not like topposting in replies? It seems that (from > my experience) that the business world in general _always_ topposts > replies. It's rather like putting the cart before the horse. I can distinguish about four different styles: 1. The oldest was where you had no quotation of the original message at all. It's the closest to paper mail, where you never cut up the original and paste it into the reply. It has the obvious disadvantage that, to be intelligible, you have to make references to the original. 2. The next was where the entire original message was attached, frequently uneditable. This is the origin of top posting. See http://www.daemonnews.org/199902/d-advocate.html for an example. 3. Bottom posting is, as the name suggests, the opposite of top posting. It has little advantages, though it does give you a chance to know what the reply is about. 4. The most obvious way to do things is to interleave individual parts of the message. Thus you can have a blow-by-blow reply to individual points. You don't forget anything, and people know what you're talking about in every case. You can see an example of this further down in the same web page. So why don't people use 4 all the time? For many, it's too much trouble. Maybe they can't type very well (not really much of a reason; it's not much more work). More likely, the tools at their disposition aren't up to the job. This is particularly true for Microsoft-based systems, where I haven't been able to find any MUA which allows you to write messages with a real editor. Greg -- When replying to this message, please take care not to mutilate the original text. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/email.html See complete headers for address and phone numbers Please note: we block mail from major spammers, notably yahoo.com. See http://www.lemis.com/yahoospam.html for further details. --oY1uq2ONqt5kuovO Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.0 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQE+XUJfIubykFB6QiMRArmjAJ4xmuSXNXRq8Or/PObNiiDkWOjLPACcCuVB ffUI3VZpQ9LgYh8wdasgDu8= =S830 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --oY1uq2ONqt5kuovO-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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