Well, Brewster, you've chewed it over at some length on several
occasions. Get used to the idea that given the same facts, different
people will reach different conclusions, equally valid. Some people,
more experienced than you in email lists and internet forums, find top
posting preferable. It's not just the newbies, the ignorant and the
inexperienced.
Troll/Idiot
Have a nice day. Don't expect everyone else to think like you do.
On 12-Feb-10 04:27, Brewster Gillett wrote:
On Fri, 2010-02-12 at 18:41 +1100, Keith R Bainbridge wrote:
Good afternoon all, particularly the moderators
I have been criticised a few times for top posting on this list. I haven't
participated much since the last critic.
<snip>
I suspect this will start a flame or two, but I am passionate about this.
Comments please.
bg:
Firstly, this is hardly the appropriate venue for chewing over this
particular topic. But you asked.....
Top-posting has only ever made sense (and barely, at that) in a
two-person exchange of a short sequence; where all fits on one page, as:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Charlie: 1346 Wednesday
Sure - see you there at 11:45?
Madge: 0956 Tuesday
Let's have lunch tomorrow at that new Pakistani joint by the courts.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, it may look a little odd, but at least it more or less conveys the
situation without undue confusion.
But an ongoing thread on a discussion forum, sorry, Keith. As Spock
would say, "Highly illogical!". We don't live our lives in reverse
chronological order - why should we be obliged to read our egroup
discussion traffic that way?
You said:
"Surely if I thank somebody for their help, they are entitled to see my
thanks quickly."
They, and only they, Keith. Thanks and attaboys with rare exceptions
belong OFF-LIST!
This whole top-posting thing, IMHO, originated with clueless NetNoobs
several years ago, who when first encountering an email editing format,
took exactly the wrong interpretation of the usual cursor placement when
launching "REPLY" mode. And in exceptionally typical NetNoob fashion,
their choice was all about saving themselves what they saw as effort,
whilst completely and utterly failing to consider whether doing so might
cause hundreds of other list subscribers (potentially) to
be obliged to *add* to their labor.
In other words, they mistakenly thought that because when they hit
"REPLY", and found themselves positioned at the top of the msg to which
they intended to respond, this meant that they were to start typing
their response then and there, not so incidentally leaving the entire
previous post's contents completely intact - rarely the optimal choice.
Somehow it seems not to have occurred to them that the intent of such
cursor positioning was to offer the responder a logical way of first
drilling down through the content of the post being answered, both to
edit out those portions not relative to the response, and to quickly
review what had been said in order to collect their thoughts. This is
particularly significant where a responder is attempting to address
several different points within the previous post; the best way, for the
people who have to *read* the bloody thing, is to intersperse, and
always with adequate attribution for all participants, BTW, their
commentary by individual subtopic in a logical fashion. This largely
eliminates the reader having to constantly scroll up and down to connect
the response commentaries to what was said in the original.
All of this makes such basic common sense, and speaks so plainly to the
hoary old notions (honored in the post-AOL days more in the breach,
sadly) of traditional Net courtesy, that I am still sometimes startled
by cases of people not getting it.
FWIW.
Dazzled by my irrefutable eloquence, you will undoubtedly go and
sin no more :-)
BTW we have a Bainbridge Island in the Pacific Northwest - in Puget
Sound just west of Seattle. Probably named after an early ship
captain...
Brewster
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
