On 21/08/13 08:40, Andy McKenzie wrote:

Well, since someone else brought it up... I really prefer top posting.  In
general, I don't WANT to reread every message:  I want to quickly get to
whatever is new.

You shouldn't have to reread every message. At most, you should have to skim a 
few paragraphs of quoted text to establish context, and then get to the new 
stuff. Like here. Notice I've trimmed all the extraneous conversation, and got 
right down to the bit that matters.

Of course, this is a simple case. Sometimes it's harder to trim, and you end up 
with multiple paragraphs of older text. But even then you don't have to read 
the whole thing, you should be able to skim it, looking for key words or key 
sentences that establish context.

Those with reading difficulties (e.g. the blind or partially sighted, those 
reading in a language they are not fluent in, or simply lousy readers) may have 
trouble skimming text. I'm sympathetic, but they're not actually worse off than 
with top-posting. They can just ignore the quoted text, and hope that the 
response makes sense without context. Just like reading a top-posted message.


[...]
What REALLY gets to me is the people who try to insist that their way is
objectively RIGHT, and everyone else is practicing bad habits, or polluting
the net, or some other nonsense like that.  The fact is, we just have
different work flow preferences.  You like one thing, I like another.  If
you want to present your view rationally and objectively, or talk about
your preferred layouts, that's fine.  But let's not start saying someone
has "bad habits" because they disagree with you.

I've been getting and sending email long enough, in enough different contexts, 
that I think I can objectively say: most email users can't write for shit, and 
posting style doesn't enter into it, they're just poor writers, lazy writers, 
incompetent writers. On a technical forum like this, you're seeing a 
better-than-average set of writers.

I think I can also say that for a wide range of situations, top-posting is 
objectively worse for a number of reasons, but it's not too bad if you have a 
very small number of emails between just two parties, and it certainly does 
have an advantage that it clearly puts the response right up top where it is 
easy to see.

The worst part of top-posting is that the typical email will raise more than 
one question or point that needs answering, but without context, it's hard to 
clearly respond when top-posting. You need a chunk of added verbiage:

    You asked a question about map(), the answer is blah blah blah.

    You also asked about the exception that you got. The line of code that
    failed was blah blah blah, and the reason for the exception was blah...

    Also, you mentioned blah blah blah, to which I say, blah...


You simply don't need that extra verbiage when posting interleaved after the 
question, the question can stand for itself! But since most people are lazy 
writers, they don't do either. They arbitrarily pick one question (usually the 
first, or the simplest) and answer it alone.

(I've sent business emails to people where I clearly said "I need the answer to 
these three questions or we cannot proceed with your project", and enumerate the 
questions, and they responded to the *last* question and ignored the other two. Lazy 
*and* stupid, the story of mankind.)

What gets me is the ever-growing cancerous lump of 
quoted-quoted-quoted-quoted-quoted text that grows at the bottom of top-posted 
emails. Email volume grow exponentially in size, e.g.:

First email is 5 lines long.
Reply is 5 lines long + 5 quoted lines, = 10 lines.
Reply to that is 5 lines long, + 10 quoted lines = 15 lines.
Reply to that is 5 lines long, + 15 quoted lines = 20 lines.
Reply to that is 5 lines long, + 20 quoted lines = 25 lines.

After five emails, we have a total of 75 lines of text, of which only 25 lines 
is actual fresh content, a ratio of 33%. The signal-to-noise ratio rapidly 
diminishes. After ten emails, the ratio is 18%, and after 20, just 9%. That's 
worse than interleaved posting with trimming, where the ideal is a 1:1 ratio. 
Real email conversations don't get anywhere near that ideal, but my estimate is 
that a ratio of 50% or better is easily attainable so long as people trim.

In practice, business email is even worse than this: messages tend to be short, 
and those stupid and legally meaningless disclaimers at the bottom of emails 
long. I've seen a TWENTY line disclaimer, quoted FOURTEEN times, in a single 
email:

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>> This email may contain blah blah blah ...
  >>>>>>>>>>>>> This email may contain blah blah blah ...
  >>>>>>>>>>>> This email may contain blah blah blah ...
  >>>>>>>>>>> This email may contain blah blah blah ...
  >>>>>>>>>> This email may contain blah blah blah ...
  ...

Seriously, I kid you not.

A few years ago, the company I work for took a customer to court for 
non-payment. During discovery, we had to provide the customer with copies of 
all emails between us. I estimated the volume of email to be multiple thousands 
of pages, if printed out in full, and only a couple of dozen if we extracted 
out the fresh (unquoted) content, trimming legal disclaimers and signatures and 
quoting. To a first approximation, the signal to noise ratio of business email 
is approximately zero :-)



--
Steven
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