On Friday, April 11, 2014 9:29:00 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 1:17 PM, Rustom Mody wrote: > > > There are cultures -- far more pervasive than USENET in 2014 -- where > > top posting is the norm, eg > > > - Gmail makes top posting the norm. Compare the figures of gmail and Usenet > > users > > - Corporate cultures more or less require top posting -- helped by MS > > Outlook > > Else it looks like dishonesty/dissimulation/hiding > > - Personally I am on different groups. I tend to top post by default. And > > its > > as strange and bizarre there as its required minimum etiquette here > > I have seen plenty of cultures where people are unaware of the value > of interleaved/bottom posting, but so far, not one where anyone has > actually required it. Not one. "Norm" here just means "the thing > people are too lazy to not do". That's not a reason for anyone else > doing it.
Right. Its true that when I was at a fairly large corporate, I was not told: "Please always top post!" What I was very gently and super politely told was: "Please dont delete mail context" Now when a mail goes round between 5 persons and what is addressed at one point is not the immediate previous mail, bottom-posting without pruning is as meaningless as top posting. As in religion or any cultural matter, its fine to stand up for and even vociferously uphold one's 'own' whatever that may be. What is unhelpful is - to suggest that my norms are universal norms. IOW there is a fundamental difference between natural and human-made laws - to lose track of statistics, in this case the population-densities of USENET vs other internet-kiddie cultures -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
