OT: posting

[Sean Ahern]

Nicholas Matsakis wrote:
> A
> B
> >A
> C
> >B
> >>A
> D
> >C
> >>B
> >>>A

Well, in my experience, it's rare that people do "inline" responses when
top-posting, but I agree that that looks even worse!

> 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.

And that's the main point, that context really should be "sprinkled" rather
than included wholesale.  Including the entire context makes reading
long threads annoying, no matter whether top-posting or bottom-posting
is used.

> Bottom posting (top quoting) is only annoying if an entire long message is 
> quoted before a response. In practice people rarely do this,

Worse, I've seen cases where people will put a one-line response inline
(bottom-posting) within thousands of lines of quoted text.  Yes, it's
rare, just as I hope top-posting to an entire quoted digest is.

> 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.

It was meant mainly as satire, pointing out that neither technique is
abominable and neither is a panacea.  I actually prefer bottom-posting,
personally.

Honestly, I didn't expect the level of response that I've received, and
didn't really intend to be drawn into a discussion of the merits of
posting techniques.  Some people found my response funny, others found
it offensive.  In actuality, I use both bottom-posting and top-posting
(with my preference being bottom-posting, as I mentioned), depending on
the context.

Cheers!

-Sean

__
Sean Ahern
ahern at ornl.gov