On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 08:13:17AM -0800, GANNS.com wrote: [bottom posting provides required context] > ...only if you are new to the list and therefore have not been > following the thread (less than 1% of a list). Or you're like me and can't maintain a mental cache of the context of the hundreds of messages you've received recently. I certainly don't check all my mail folders or newsgroups even once every day. I rely on context being clearly and immediately visible or else I'm liable to skip the message.
> Bottom and middle posting forced everyone to scroll down to find > replies embedded in the text (100% of a list). Why do you have to "scroll down"? If the quoted text has been sensibly trimmed, there will rarely be any need to scroll down to see the start of the new text. I might have to scroll down if I were reading mail in a 24-line terminal window, but then if I had one of those I'd cut down on the amount of screen real estate occupied by status information or lines of headers. And I will admit I'm not sure what method would be optimal for someone using a screenreader - it would probably depend a lot on the user and the messages in question. Much of the "top-posting" trend in recent years seems to result from automatic quoting of the entire original message, signatures, footers, stupid legal disclaimers and all. Often the formatting gets hopelessly mangled or the delimiters necessary for interleaving replies are omitted. Users are encouraged just to type at the top and send. It makes me pine for when a particular NNTP client would nag you if you had more text quoted in your posting than new text... I got a mail today in which the sender told me new text was "written in red". As I don't read email in HTML, and there was no other delimitation of quoted text, it was rather hard to tell quotation from response. Sigh. I fear responding to that will be a low priority. > In summary, top posting is less labor for the poster and the reader. Bottom > and middle posting is more labor for the poster and the reader. It's less labour for me as poster not to delete the 19 lines of signature, footer and quoted text that followed this. And most readers probably got bored three paragraphs back. Still, I've done so :-) -- --------------- Robin Stevens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----------------- Oxford University Computing Services ----------- Web: http://www.cynic.org.uk/ ------- (+44)(0)1865: 273212 (work) 273275 (fax) Mobile: 07776 235326 ------- _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
