On Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:36:31 -0400, Fuzzy Logic wrote: > > On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 10:15 PM, Tony Mechelynck > <[email protected]> wrote:
> > To the guy whose post is _nothing but_ a cursory, unfounded > > assertion that top-posting is better > > How about a founded assertion? I find that if I'm actively following a > thread, and the topic is not requiring a point-by-point reply, I get > people's thoughts much quicker when I don't have to reread the message > I just read to get to the reply. For example (not meaning to pick on > you, Tony), but I had to go through 38 lines of your message to get to > the meat of your reply. You might want to investigate the facilities you mail reader has for colouring or otherwise marking quoted text. I've got mine (Claws) set up so quoted text has a different background colour to unquoted text (and it gets darker the deeper the quoting). As a result it is simple to work out what lines are quoted and I've already read in a previous mail and so skip over them. > If I'm not following the thread, I would still have to read the same > amount of text to get to understand your reply with either top and > bottom posting. But if someone uses bottom posted (or even better intersperses their reply so each point is answered in turn) you can read the message top-to-bottom and get the context in chronological order. If a message is top-posted you have to scroll down to get the context. And if all replies are top-posted you potentially have to scroll down a lot to get to the start of the thread, then scroll up to read each reply, but possibly have to scroll down as your reading each reply, then scroll back up again to get to the next one, and so on. This can result in a _lot_ of scrolling up and down, rather than just simply scrolling down in one easy movement. I know I made the (slightly flippant) point about reading books from the last chapter to the first in a previous thread, but it's easy to see a continuum between that and the classic one-line argument against top-posting, a version of which is: A: Because the message is out-of-order Q: So why is top-posting bad? A: Top-posting Q: What's the worst thing you can do in an email? It could be argued that it's easy to skip to the bottom of such a short message and read from the bottom to the top, whereas the chapters in a book are generally much too long to be read from back to front - you be continuously skipping backwards to find the start of the chapter you need to read next - but it's really a continuum of difficulty between the two - at which point do you draw the line and say "OK, this is so big it needs to be output in chronological order"? -- 9:00am up 23 days 14:55, 1 user, load average: 1.46, 1.37, 1.68 Registered Linux User #232457 | LFS ID 11703 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
