Hi,
I have a very strong reason for top posting and a very strong one for not agreeing too much bottom posting at all, and this is the fact that I am blind and if I need to read a bottom post, I need to read again and again the whole original message, even though most of the time I remember what was it about, and I don't like to lose so much time to read it again so many times.
Do the words get smaller at the bottom? Having to scroll thru line after line of message doesn't deal with top vs. bottom posting...that stems from people not trimming non-releative parts out of the message.
I have read somewhere a Netiquette rule that advice top posting (I don't remember where, but could be on W3C site...) and the reasons for that rule were that:
I have *never* seen any site dealing with mailing lists/newsgroups that suggested top posting over bottom posting.
1. Most of the times, the members of the list remember the subject of the original message, and those who don't remember it, can make that effort for scrolling down, because the most important part is not the original message, but the answer.
Did you take a survey of list members to come to the conclusion of who remembers what? I usually remember what's going on in a thread only if I've been posting to that thread from the begininning. I, along with many other members of this list post to numerous mailing lists, but according to you, we remember the subject matter of one little thread? And if we don't, it's up to us to scroll thru the mess of top and bottom posted replies so that we can figure out what's going on, just to help someone?
2. People with dissabiliteies, that access the computer reading line by line, will have to skip many rows sometimes in order to reach to the important part of the message, and very often that important part have just a single line, or two lines, and they might skip them if they read the text faster.
Everyone on this list who falls into this category, raise your hand. I'm sorry if you have a disability and all, but you're suggesting that the good of the one outweighs the good of the many.
3. Top posting is much easier to be done for most of the members of a list, because they don't have to trim the original message very selective, but they can just hit "reply", start writing, then they can press page down once or a few times, or point with the mouse, and delete from that point to the end of the original message and that's all. If bottom posting, the original message need to be trimmed for not including signatures, advertising, and other unneeded things.
Ahhh, the laziness defense.
Well, I guess these are the reasons Microsoft made their mail clients in such a way that the text cursor appears at the top of the "reply window" by default, and not by mistake, and let's don't forget that most computer users use MS Windows...
Yeah, MS is so good with standards.
<snip>
See, trimming posts...not that hard.
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