On Fri, 2003-10-10 at 12:12, Jason Wong wrote: > On Friday 10 October 2003 22:44, Robert Cummings wrote: > > > > *Most* bottom posters are savvy enough to trim posts adequately to ensure > > > that there is no crap to wade through whilst maintaining some kind of > > > continuity within a thread. > > > > I'll call this premise one, which is by no means a tautology since it > > really depends on the disposition of the poster. > > That's why I emphasised the *most*. However my theory is that bottom posters > are most likely to be people who have been using email and mailing lists long > before MS has even heard about the internet. Why bring MS into this? Because > if wasn't for their damned Outlooks then top posting would probably be > unheard of.
I'm using Evolution under linux :/ nd I've been using email and mailing lists (or newsgroups before that on BBSs etc) for about 15 years. I havn't seen this as much of an issue until recently. > > > 1) It is certainly not efficient in bandwidth terms (see above). > > > > This is based on premise one, which makes it only as valid as the case > > where a bottom poster doesn't trim a post. > > Like I said above *most* of them do. There is a noticeable exception, a > gentleman who goes by the name of Tom :-) I generally trim. But then again, I top post short and quick answers, intermingle contextual answer, and bottom post when I feel the need for flow. > I'll bet you a beer that bottom posters are more likely to trim their posts > than top posters. The very concept of top posting does not encourage people > to trim posts, they just add their stuff to the top, probably don't even see > or care how much rubbish there is underneath and hit the send button. Now how am I going to claim my beer unless we can come up with a rigorous and valid way to determine the correctness of your claim. > Anyway all that needs to be said about top vs bottom posting can be found in > any decent guide to using mailing lists. > > > Nothing stopping them from scrolling to the bottom and reading upward. > > Apart from years of ingrained practice. That's no excuse. > > From what I keep hearing about how humans read we scan in parallel > > anyways and so reading bottom to top should have little difference over > > reading from top to bottom. And besides, who ever said reading from top > > to bottom is the "best" way. Heck, some languages read right to left. > > But we're talking about English which usually goes from left to right and from > top to bottom (at least does where I come from!) I dunno, I see banners all the time which have the characters running vertically and left to right. While this is still left to right, the orientation is changed, and I've never heard anyone complain about vertically oriented banners. > > Feel free to break the mold and try alternatives ;) > > Heck I might even be brave enough to try InterJinn. Come on now, there's no need to tease ;) Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `------------------------------------------------------------' -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
