Personally, these emails don't help me at all in my search for help, or helping people with php problems. Could I suggest that you guys maybe put a forum up for anybody who wants to bitch about this topic? OR maybe someone could setup a php-arguments list for topics such as these!Robert Cummings <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Friday, November 07, 2003 1:12 PM said:
Yes you're re-iterating your circular arguments. Here's how I see your point of view:
Everyone must do it because the majority are doing it (AKA the sheep
follows the sheep follows... who's leading?)
I'd say the majority DON'T bottom-post, in which case you are the one that's doing the following.
My argument against top-posting is the following:
1. It's not the how the English language is correctly written/read. Why should emails be any different?
2. It's easier for a person to go with what they know (i.e. I speak and read the English language therefore I read left to right, top to bottom) than to learn something new (i.e. I contribute to mailing lists therefore I read left to right, bottom to top). (I'm talking paragraphs and sentences here, not line by line.)
3. Assuming an email is trimmed properly, the average distance in lines between the response and the original comment is much greater when top-posting than when bottom-posting, especially considering top-posters mostly don't trim their emails.
4. If there are multiple points in an email that someone wants to respond to and they are a top-poster they will do one of the following things:
a. Write "comments inline" at the top of the email and then proceed to put their comments inline in the original message not making any delineation between the original text and their response. This requires that you are familiar with the original email and can decide which is a comment and which is original text.
b. Write a few paragraphs/sentences responding to each different point without making any mention of which points in the original email they are responding to. In this case you have to be very familiar with the previous email to easily understand what they are responding to, OR reread the original email to refresh yourself.
c. Copy and paste the bits and pieces they want to respond to into the top of the email leaving the original email intact as well. Redundant, wasteful, plain inefficient. Aren't we programmers (or pretend to be, like me)? Aren't we supposed to love efficiency?
If you're a bottom-poster and you want to respond to multiple points in an email you simply separate the original emails paragraphs by inserting your response. This is similar to point b above except that there is a clear delineation between your response and the original email. Usually in the form of a > preceding each line of original email text.
5. Top-posting is lazy. I'm on another list where the people will respond to a 10k email (most of which is Outlook header info and mailing list footers) with one stupid line (and usually it's just a retarded joke).
If you follow the link in my sig you'll find a utility called Outlook QuoteFix that automagically reformats your replies in Outlook so that you can still be lazy but have your emails formatted in a logical way. I know for a fact that I've already converted a few people and they were very happy to have seen the light. :) I know I was.
I'll try my best to make this my last post on this subject. :)
Chris. -- Don't like reformatting your Outlook replies? Now there's relief! http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/
Thanks in advance,
Rolf Brusletto
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