On 2006.05.01 18:23 MontrealPaul wrote:
regarding the "netiquette" of having newer material down below: While it may
seem logical, from a top-to-bottom-left-to-right (in our culture)...
"our culture" in this sense: English, like all languages descended from Latin,
is written from top to bottom, and within each line from left to right, as the
thought is developed.
... sense, to have older material at the top, it get increasingly annoying to
have to scroll down past everyone's 'old news' to get to the newer stuff,...
It's not a question of older/newer; it's a question of order of thought, as:
This.
What's wrong with putting the answer before the question?
... then maybe scroll too far, then have to hunt for the start of the newer
stuff.
Properly done, that should never happen. What is proper? This is the essence
of netiquette: With one writer and typically multiple readers, the burden is
on the writer to respect the readers' time. So the usually-forgotten
corollary (in the tedious top-posting/bottom-posting wars) is to *minimize
quoting* -- prune all but what is relevant to the reply. That way, you not
only do *not* have to hunt for the thoughts in the reply, you see *directly*
the context of the reply, which minimizes ambiguity about the writer's intent.
This has the additional advantage that, when a writer replies to a post, he
responds to every point, or at least every point for which he has a response.
Far too often the laziness that top-posting has engendered results in a
poorly-considered reaction at the top of a post, often missing one or more
crucial points in the completely unedited text that follows -- indeed, often
missing the point entirely -- so we have a worthless thought followed by a
complete regurgitation of thoughts to which the writer may or may not be
responding -- followed by perhaps a half dozen copies of the list footer. It
is stupid. It is [as the SMS restrictions observe] an abuse of bandwidth. It
is, finally, a reflection of our increasingly poor manners, conveying an
implicit message that the writer's time is too valuable to edit for the
readers' convenience and understanding.
Of course there are times when no quoting at all is needed to convey a simple
reply to a simple question. Then don't quote, above or below [cf SMS].
So, if the critical question is editing he quoted material, rather than where
you put it, why do the relevant RFCs deprecate top-posting? Because it is
simply incompatible with proper editing, inviting the kind of time- and
bandwidth-wasting abuse described above. When you edit for context, you
automatically put your response below the thought to which it responds - and
in the process shorten the whole post.
There is a larger context to this question, about how we got to our generally
slovenly state of netiquette, and some illuminating history as well as current
examples of lists that still operate with the courtesy and efficiency that was
common 20 years ago ... but in the interest of relative brevity I will stop here.
--
John
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