Bruce et al.
I'm posting a new thread with the "Top Posting" subject so I won't draw complaints about "hijacking" the 4-port thread. Top Posting refers to the practice of sending a message with a reply at the top and including the entire thread below the reply. I prefer this. If I'm actively following a thread, the most-recent information appears at the top of the message I receive. If I've missed part of the thread, I need to look only at the most recent message and scroll down a bit to see what's been happening. Bottom Posting requires me to scroll through all of the history before I see the newest addition. While scrolling down, I may see something new and realize that the sender has interleaved responses, addressing multiple points with individual responses. It's been a while, but when I researched "Top Posting" I found this Wikipedia description: "Top-posting is a natural consequence of the behavior of the "reply" function in many current e-mail readers, such as Microsoft Outlook <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Outlook> , Gmail <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail> , and others. By default, these programs insert into the reply message a copy of the original message (without headers and often without any extra indentation or quotation markers), and position the editing cursor <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_%28computers%29> above it. Moreover, a bug present on most flavours of Microsoft Outlook caused the quotation markers to be lost when replying in plain text to a message that was originally sent in HTML/RTF. In addition, users of mobile devices <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_device> , like BlackBerries <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry> , are encouraged to use top-posting, because the devices only download the beginning of a message for viewing. The rest of the message is only retrieved when needed, which takes additional download time. Putting the relevant content at the beginning of the message requires less bandwidth, less time, and less scrolling for the Blackberry user.[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#cite_note-3> [5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#cite_note-4> [6] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#cite_note-5> For these and possibly other reasons, many users seem to accept top-posting as the "standard" reply style." .and an explanation of why people complain about it: "Objections to top-posting on newsgroups, as a rule, seem to come from persons who first went online in the earlier days of Usenet <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet> , and in communities that date to Usenet's early days. Until the mid-90s, top-posting was unknown and interleaved posting an obvious standard that all net.newcomers had to learn. Among the most vehement communities are those in the Usenet <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy> comp.lang hierarchy, especially comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++. Top-posting is more tolerated on the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.*_hierarchy> alt hierarchy. Newer online participants, especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend to be less sensitive to arguments about posting style." When I post (which is rarely, as I have little to offer the list), I top post and explain that it's my preference and I don't know how to do it effectively otherwise. This gives everyone fair warning to delete my posts before reading them. --Don Don Kelly PCF Corp People Come First 651 842-1000 888 Don Kell(y) 651 842-1001 fax
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