On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 10:18 PM, ss <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks for giving me the opportunity to say what I was going to say anyway > even if the opportunity did not present itself. > > Top posting is not poor etiquette. Farting loudly in public or picking your > nose and wiping snot on the tablecloth is poor etiquette. > > The problem with top posting is lack of clarity. This is a list (like many > others) where there are multiple parallel conversations. Having to scroll > down a page to figure out what was said earlier in order to invite the > response you see at the top of the page leads to this lack of clarity - > often > for a third person who has not directly been taking part in a particular > exchange. > > Of course most countries don't legislate against farting in public or > wiping > snot on the table cloth. But other than the idiocy of Blackberries that > form > less than 0.001 percent of email sending machines leading to arrogant > laziness in top posting - it is such a pain to read top posted emails that > there can be almost no excuse for not being able to avoid top posting. > > Just my view. >
I understand all of the above. But I also frequently hear many people saying that top-posting is an obsolete practice "which only your silklist friends follow" as most people look for a response on top, at the beginning of your email to them and (at least in one famous instance) assume that you have sent back their mail with no reply at all...until they look below their...ummm...post. I find that the best thing is to just keep the parts of the message that you want to retain for reference, delete the rest, and type your responses after each part that you want to comment on. I personally had no problem deciphering "top-posted" messages until I got on to this list, and U-know-who kept telling me that TP was a BT (Bad Thing) ..for all the reasons mentioned above. And to dispute the point that someone made by writing right-to-left and bottom-to-top, yes, that was a bad practice to follow in English. But if it had been Arabic, the right-to-left would have made sense, and the left-to-right would not have. So...*I* think that top- or bottom- posting is just a matter of what one is used to, like driving on the left or right sides of a road. On the silklist, I am careful not to top post, but am not particular about it elsewhere...especially after that "why can't you respond at the top of your mail to me?" query. It's just that bottom-posting (is there such a phrase?) is the convention on this list...so I conform, like a Good Person. I now await the flood of mails that will tell me how wrong I am! Cheers, Deepa.
