At the risk of starting a flame-war I am going to state that top-posting is bad on publicly archived mailing lists. Can we please stop doing it?
It is very difficult to understand what is going on in a mailing list, especially the archives, if it is common practice to top-post rather than reply inline. The problem is that one has to go back to the beginning of a thread to get a grasp of the context of a discussion. Top posting assumes that everyone has read every word up until that post. Very often this is not the case. Very often people dip into a thread half way through. Either because they have been busy for a few hours whilst the discussion progressed or because they got to the message via an archive search. Replying inline with careful cutting of no longer relevant content (this is the hard part), retains context and allows people to understand the main gist of what is being said. If someone is looking for the answer to a question in the archives, this context will tell them if the answer provide is for the question they are asking (in fact inline posting makes most search engines more accurate too as a result of proximity matching). If the person is dipping in to an ongoing thread the context can tell them how far back they need to read in order to understand the current position. I realise that some people disagree with this and prefer top posting. However, in ASF projects it is generally accepted that top posting is bad. Other environments are good for top posting, but ASF projects are not. Ross -- Ross Gardler (@rgardler) Programme Leader (Open Development) OpenDirective http://opendirective.com
