> From: David Land <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Fool, > > Replying off-line. > > > Top-posting is never acceptable in any forum of communication, email, > > newsgroup, weblog, or otherwise. > > You are wrong. What is acceptable is determined by general agreement o > the parties concerned, and not by how loud one person can yell or by how > hard he tries to make himself feel better by putting down others.
It's wrong, wrong, wrong. It's Bad Netiquette. It's Bad Grammar. It breaks 2400 years of the format of replying point by point in a dialog. It Destroys _All Context_ in a conversation. It Inflates messages with unnecessary-unwanted commentary that isn't being replied to, as people who top-post don't delete the un-replied to portions of messages, which can be 20k, for a 1 line response. Some people still have to pay for their access, and you just cost them money by top posting. Messages also get stored on various computers, and so you are costing money in terms of storage space, that should have been unnecessary in the first place. Also People Here Assume when you post that you are actually responding to commentary and they then scroll through the entire remaining quoted commentary looking for new commentary, which isn't there. A complete waste of time for every single person reading your message. But if it becomes known that you are a blatant top-poster, noone will ever look through your posts to find proper point-response commentary you may have made. See you just made everybody else lazy too. People do not read from the bottom up, and any newcomers that stumble in where there is top-posting will not understand the context of messages they come across, because the start of the message is at the bottom. Because these are conversations that more than one person tend to be engaged in. Propagation Delays can cause messages to come out of order, sometimes by days (or months), further destroying context within a thread. You can't rely on threads being in order. Context is almost never perfectly reliable. This isn't a chatroom. If you are too lazy to properly snip un-responded-to commentary then I am unwilling to engage in meaningful conversation with you, esp one that destroys context in every single damn message. > As it turns out, almost all weblogs operate by placing the most recent > entry at the top. They are *entirely* based on top-posting. False analogy. Weblogs are individual commentary, usually without any relationship. What you should instead compare it to is Weblog Comments, which just so happen to follow what format? > > Bottom-posting is a perfectly acceptable practice. > > Yup. Never said it wasn't. Try reading the actual content of my message. > The fact that people on Brin-L seem to prefer intralinear posting is > simply my observation. > > > Is being a dim-witted top-poster the Meme of the clueless AOL newbie? > > Perhaps it is, perhaps not. I wouldn't know. Funny you should mention > AOL, since I've never posted to this list from AOL, and neither did > Travis. I guess it's just easier than thinking. Top-posting makes one look like an AOL newbie using numbers 4 letters and unable to write. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
