Re: top posting

"Andrew Sullivan" <ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca> writes:

> I would argue that this message is harder to read than if I'd just replied
> at the top. It's pointlessly long -- but without including everything, you
> wouldn't have all the context, and you might have missed something.

We're not goldfish, we can remember the topic of discussion for at least a few
hours.

But what you're touching on here is that the real reason newcomers to the
internet favour top-posting: their mail user agents suck. If you have a
threaded mail reader you can always go and reread the original messages for
context. Copying the entire message thread backwards on the end of every
message is just a terrible way to emulate a threaded mail reader for people
who have bad tools.

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?

Top-posting makes perfect sense if you start from the broken place of assuming
you need to copy the entire thread into every message. It's a bit like saying
"but officer I had to speed to keep up with the guy I was tailgating!"

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
Get trained by Bruce Momjian - ask me about EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL training!