OT: posting

[Nicholas Matsakis]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Sean Ahern wrote:

> Q: Why
>   can
>   bottom-posting
>   be
>   an
>   annoying
>   thing?

If you want to talk about scrolling, try reading the digest version of 
this list!  If you have a thread with messages A, B, C, and D and everyone 
top posts (bottom quotes) what you see is:

A
B
>A
C
>B
>>A
D
>C
>>B
>>>A

That's presuming that none of these members is a digest reader who 
happened to quote the entire digest (which I have seen happen)! What the 
digest really want to see is the following, with a little bit of context 
sprinkled in.

A
B
C
D

Bottom posting (top quoting) is only annoying if an entire long message is 
quoted before a response. In practice people rarely do this, but they 
quite often drag around long chains of context at the bottom of the 
message which makes the threads more difficult to follow, list digests 
abominable, and top quoting more onerous (because you have to delete that 
big long tail to pick out the relevant context).  Your complaint is a 
straw man.

Nick Matsakis