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Quoting Neil Winchurst <barnaby@xxxxxxxxxx>:
Gordon Henderson wrote:On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, Rhia Knowles wrote:Well, I read mails from here in Gmail, which turns the conversation into a threaded view, and hide the quoted text. I top post cos it;s email standard these days, unless there is specific chunks i want to reply to.To posting is not an email standard it's an abhorration used by those who came into the game late, hand-fed by the lazy microsoft engine. For googness sake - just how hard it is to posituin the mouse pointer at the end of the document trim off all the unneeded signatures and start to type? Now you're going to lose the proper mening of this thread because I'm going to trim it. == A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right. Q: Why should I start my reply below the quoted text? A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: The lost context. Q: What makes top-posted replies harder to read than bottom-posted? A: Yes. Q: Should I trim down the quoted part of an email to which I'm replying? GordonAgreed, but the problem with many on this list is that they don't remove the irrelevant parts of the original email. If it is a long email then it can indeed be a nuisance to scroll right down to the bottom to find the new reply. However, remove the unnecessary parts of the original mail and it is much easier.
I invoke Godwin's Law: "The Nazis were top-posters therefore top-posting is wrong" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law for more info)Seriously, this discussion is never going to go away. It's down to personal preference.
I try and always post at the end of the message (or reply in-line to salient points) because it makes more sense to me. It's how just about any other written communications medium works.
I also accept that the vast majority of people these days know of no other operating system save Microsoft and that because of this they have always top-posted.
Top Vs. Bottom-posting KDE V.s Gnome Vim/Vi Vs. EMACS Gnu/Linux Vs. Gnu/Herd The arguments will continue long after we have all passed on.Unless there are strict rules on a mailing list that enforce one method or the other of posting, we will all have to accept that some people do things differently to us and just get on with life.
Kind regards, Matt -- Matthew Macdonald-Wallace matthew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.truthisfreedom.org.uk/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html