This is an edit of a message I sent to a non-public mailing list. The perennial top-posting debate arose again, and someone posted a message that seemed to be genuinely puzzled by the issues. I wrote the original of this in response. Then, I found myself wanting to point someone else at it, but the list was not public. So I've gone through and replaced all the quoted text with loose paraphrases of the text I was actually replying to, since the exact wordings are not very important. ---------------- First, a big caveat: I am speaking purely personally here. The opinions and stances outlined below should not be assumed to be shared by anyone else. > What's so horrible about top-quoted text? It disrupts reading. If I can remember exactly what the conversation said, and the reply text comes nowhere near making sense except in reply to one piece of it, then I can ignore the quotes and just read the response and everything's fine. Those are rarely the case, though. And, in that case, reading a top-post means I have to read lines in an unusual and somewhat disorienting order. For example, consider (line numbers added for expository ease) 1 Reply to part A, line 1 2 Reply to part A, line 2 3 4 Reply to part B, line 1 5 Reply to part B, line 2 6 7 > Irrelevant stuff 8 > Irrelevant stuff 9 > Part A 10 > Irrelevant stuff 11 > Irrelevant stuff 12 > Part B 13 > Irrelevant stuff 14 > Irrelevant stuff where, to make sense of it, I have to read lines in the order 9, 1, 2, 12, 4, 5, which I find remarkably disruptive, especially if the parts are large enough that it doesn't all fit on the screen at once. I likely will have to read some of 7-8 and/or 10-11 as well to pick out parts A and B - though if the quotes are properly trimmed for relevance (see my next paragraph), at least 7-8 and 10-11 won't be confusing things. In some cases there's no obvious break like line 3 above and it's up to me to notice when the reply to part A ends and the reply to part B begins. This leads into the other major issue I have with it. While not, strictly, related, top-posting almost always goes with no quote trimming, and that is often, I would even say usually, an even greater offense. It produces quadratic size growth in things like ticket systems, it almost always includes a few headers and signatures as well and thus means even more dreck to scroll through looking for the three lines I care about amid dozens - often hundreds - I don't. > Bottom-quoting is worse because I have to scroll to the bottom to > find the new contribution, which with top-quoting is at the top. True as far as it goes. But bottom-posting is relatively rare. The two major camps I've seen are untrimmed top-posting and trimmed inline (the latter being what I'm doing here: trimming quotes for relevance and interspersing responses amid them). > While having the whole thread history may be annoying, at least the > information is available. True...again, true as far as it goes. Value to archivists is probably increased by no-trimming (top versus bottom versus inline responses being of little import in this regard). Most email correspondents are not archivists. I, for example, delete practically all my mail after one reading anyway; archival value is of no real relevance to me. What archival I do care about usually is handled by list archives that generally contain the whole thread anyway. > [...] when using lynx, I can dump the entire thing into a text file > which I can edit for readbility. ...if you read mail with a web browser. That strikes me as driving nails with a pair of pliers, though I suppose if you like doing that.... And, if you have to edit the text to make it easy to read, the sender has failed, at least as far as you're concerned. See below. > With trimming, I have to count on the poster to determine which parts > of the text were relevant. True. Trimming for relevance is a skill, and if you are dealing with a correspondent who is totally crappy at it (and unwilling or unable to learn), you may be better off with untrimmed email. Personally, my experience is that untrimmed replies are of substantially less value to read than trimmed replies. Whether this is because the extra work involved in reading them leeches away value that might otherwise be present or because being the sort of person who doesn't trim correlates positively with being the sort of person who writes stuff I find has low value is difficult for me to tell. > Nothing's perfect for everyone, but I really wonder why top-posting > draws so much venom given the above advantages (new stuff first and > the whole thread history accessible). Well, I hope I've given you a few reasons. There's actually another one that comes to mind, much fuzzier than the ones above: showing respect. Taking the time to put thought into trimming for relevance, taking the time to pair up responses with text they respond to, these are things that indicate, at some level, that the writer respects the reader enough to try to make the reader's job easier. (Whether this attempt actually succeeds in any particular case is a different matter.) When I see an untrimmed top-posted reply, it's hard to not see it as "my time is so much more valuable than yours that I can't be bothered to put a little of my time into saving a little of yours". When sent to a mailing list, this is multiplied, because there are many readers but still but a single author. (I realize that not all untrimmed top-posters actually intend that; I'm simply saying that's how it tends to come across.) In some contexts there's also respect for established traditions. But that is very context-dependent; it's not an attribute of untrimmed top-posting, but an attribute of untrimmed top-posting in certain contexts. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B