Carroll, Barry schreef: > Secondly, can someone point me to the Standard Usenet Convention that > mandates against top-posting. This is not sarcasm; I would really like > to see it. You see, I recently returned to Usenet after a LONG absence. > When I was last a regular Usenet citizen the Internet was new, GUI > interfaces were experimental and the World Wide Web didn't exist yet. > Newsreader software was text-based. Top-posting was the common > practice, because it was the most convenient: you didn't have to page > through an arbitrarily large number of messages, most of which you'd > already read umpteen times, to get to the new stuff you were interested > in.
I started to use the Internet and Usenet around 1992 or 1993, and at the time 'Netiquette' was a very common word. Amongst others it recommends inline replying (as opposed to both top-posting and bottom-posting), in spirit if not in exact wording. The Wikipedia article on Netiquette (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netiquette) mentions it with as many words: "Quoting should be interspersed, with a response that follows the relevant quoted material. The result should read like a conversation, with quotes indented to aid in skimming. A common mistake is to put all new text above the quoted material, without trimming any irrelevant text. This results in a message that is much harder to follow and is much less clear in context." All groups I read at the time used that convention. In my experience it was only in more recent times that people started to use top-posting, and then only in newsgroups, forums, etc. that didn't originate in the original Internet culture. > So I'd really like to know what the standard is now. I like to know > which rules I'm choosing to break. ;^) You could do worse than RFC 1855 (http://www.dtcc.edu/cs/rfc1855.html) and the above mentioned Wikipedia article. Both cover many other issues regarding online behavior. There's also http://wiki.ursine.ca/Top_Posting which just covers quoting practices. But note that inline replying isn't as wide-spread as I think it ought to be. Places that don't have roots in Internet or Unix culture are much more likely to accept and even encourage top-posting. -- If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton Roel Schroeven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
