Christopher Sawtell wrote:
Christopher Sawtell
Sincerely etc.,
==
:-)
I hope I have made my point?
amusing moment )
word into Google for a very
( Folks might care to put that
better apply the Voldemort conventions.
software house to which we had
and abetted by a certain
a work of Satan, ably aided
that I class top posting as
I hope this makes the point
have similar problems.
I suspect that many other folks
which is posted to mail lists
infest much of the "prose"
of misunderstandings which
Judging by the huge plethora
the meaning therein.
comprehend the nuances of
difficult to read and to
response to be incredibly
In the same way as this
which have been formatted
Thus I find documents,
a few lines from the bottom.
thoughts expressed actually starts
posting email the sequence of
of the page. whereas the in a top
document to be written at the top
to expect the first word in a
Thus we are pre-programmed
from the top of the page to the bottom.
character set, English is usually read
all languages using the Latin
However, in common with
way to go.
I suppose top posting is the
page up to the the top of it, then
read from the bottom of the
conventions cause you to
If your natural language's
Here's a paragraph from a "Joel On Software" article by Joel Spolsky
from about 4 years ago, which I read yesterday and which this debate
reminded me of:
In addition to absolute success and failures in social software, there
are also social software side effects. The way social software behaves
determines a huge amount about the type of community that develops.
Usenet clients have this big-R command which is used to reply to a
message /while quoting the original message/ with those elegant >'s in
the left column. And the early newsreaders were not threaded, so if you
wanted to respond to someone's point coherently, you /had/ to quote them
using the big-R feature. This led to a particularly Usenet style of
responding to an argument: the line-by-line nitpick. It's fun for the
nitpicker but never worth reading. (By the way, the political bloggers,
newcomers to the Internet, have reinvented this technique, thinking they
were discovering something fun and new, and called it /fisking/, for
reasons I won't go into. Don't worry, it's not dirty.) Even though human
beings had been debating for centuries, a tiny feature of a software
product produced a whole new style of debating.
Here's the full article for those who are interested:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html
It's actually about software usability, and how it alters human
behaviours as a result.
David (resisting the urge to top-post...)
--
Evidence disproving evolution means evolution is wrong.
Evidence disproving the Bible means the evidence is wrong.
