Re: top posting

On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 07:44:31PM +0000, Gregory Stark wrote:

> Seriously, do you have any trouble following the discussion even though I
> only clipped two sentences of your message? If you did would you have any
> trouble finding the original message to reread it?

No, but (1) I have been doing this for years and (2) words are my friend.
Not everyone is like me. Some people find archive-trolling very difficult.

> Top-posting makes perfect sense if you start from the broken place of
> assuming you need to copy the entire thread into every message.

Or if that's the habit you have. The thing that is "easiest" is the thing
you're used to. If you learned this email thingy in an environment where
top posting was what everyone did, then that's familiar and easy, and you'll
tend to stick with it. Anyone who is trying to argue that there's some view
from nowhere at which we'd be able to decide whether top, bottom, or
interleaved posting is "better" is imagining things. There is no
trancendently right way.

Which is why I have (third time's a charm? Anyway, this is my last post on
the topic) been suggesting we need say nothing more about it than that
interleaving answers with previous posts is the convention of the community;
and if you want the best responses, you'd best follow that convention. Then
we can avoid any more discussions of what's "better". (I support the
suggestion, too, that we put as much in the friendly greeting everyone who
subscribes gets and promptly deletes without reading.)

We run this list in English, note. Is that because it's better than Latin?
No: it's because more of the participants like it that way. I bet if we had
a lot of Latin speakers, we'd have made a different decision. And yes,
there's a certain amount of circularity in such convention-picking (because
by choosing English, we surely discriminate against the unilingual Latin
speakers).

A