Re: [APD] Please Edit or Snip posts

[Stuart Halliday <stuart at stuarthalliday_com>]

urville wrote:

> and theres nothing wrong with top posting.
> ian

The world disagrees with you.

It's an abomination made popular by Microsoft and their dysfunctional programs.

Top-posting makes posts incomprehensible. Firstly: In normal conversations, 
one does not answer to something that has not yet been said. So it is 
unclear to reply to the top, whilst the original message is at the bottom. 
Secondly: In western society a book is normally read from top to bottom. 
Top-posting forces one to stray from this convention: Reading some at the 
top, skipping to the bottom to read the question, and going back to the top 
to continue. This annoyance increases even more than linear with the number 
of top-posts in the message. If someone replies to a thread and you forgot 
what the thread was all about, or that thread was incomplete for some 
reasons, it will be quite tiresome to rapidly understand what the thread was 
all about, due to bad posting and irrelevant text which has not been removed.

To prevent hideously long posts with a minimal account of new text, it is 
good Usenet and email practice to remove the non-relevant parts and 
optionally summarize the relevant parts of the original post, with regard to 
one's reply. Top-posting inevitably leads to long posts, because most 
top-posters leave the original message intact. All these long posts not only 
clutter up discussions, but they also clutter up the server space.

Top-posting makes it hard for bottom-posters to reply to the relevant parts: 
it not possible to answer within the original message. Bottom-posting does 
not make top-posting any harder.

A reason given by stubborn top-posters: they don't like to scroll to read 
the new message (ah shame).
We like to disagree here, because we always have to scroll down to see the 
original message and after that to scroll back up, just to see to what they 
are replying to. As a result you have to scroll twice as much when reading a 
top-poster's message. As a counterargument they say (believe us some do): 
"You can check the previous message in the discussion". This is even more 
tiresome than scrolling and with the unreliable nature of the Internet, the 
previous message in the discussion can be simply unavailable.


P.S.
Oh and finally there really is no need to double post your email.
I don't really need one post in my inbox *and* one in my mailing list folder.
But thanks anyway.:-))


-- 
Stuart Halliday
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