[Techtalk] Top Posting (was firewire)

[Maria Blackmore]

On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Rachel McConnell wrote:

> I'm in the minority here, and i'm top-posting this on purpose to
> demonstrate... but how many of you reading this now really _have_ to
> read any of the rest below for context?

Theory:

If you think no-one has to read anything below, chop it off :)

It may seem like a small thing, but it really can all add up, when you've
got a dozen top-posted replies floating around, and all of a sudden you've
got a multiple hundred kilobyte email that's being bounced backwards and
forwards.  In one particularly bad case I chopped off 600 kB of cruft from
an email that was sent to me, asking me to do something.  The message I
sent back to say it was done was less than 4 kB

> Top posting allows the reader to ignore the previous messages if
> they're following closely,

Such as is fulfilled by the presence of the ">", and some email clients
(and google groups) will colour code successive quotes so you can skip
over the bits you don't want to read.  This does require co-operation for
people to supply the indentations, and to trim the unneccesary, but
experience has shown this is.

> but to have ALL the references there (uncut) if they want to reread
> the whole conversation.  Reader's choice.

Well, there are several problems here, that I can see.

Firstly, it's unformatted, and thus hard to read, it needs to be tidied up
to make it readable, and once again the unneccesary parts need to be
trimmed.

Secondly, you only need all the references there if you do not keep a mail
box archive of the messages.  I would also like to point out that keeping
a mail box archive of threaded messages with properly inline quoted
material is much more efficient in terms of time, storage and network
transmitted data than to attach an entire conversation to the bottom of
every message.  Inline quoted messages only transmit what they need to,
and they only store what they need to, Top posted messages would require
an intense management structure in order to make sure that you only keep
the posts that you need to keep to follow the conversation, whilst
removing unnesary material.  If everyone top posted it would also take a
*phenomenal* amount of time to read a conversation thread [0], because you
have to scroll down to a point in the middle ofthe cruft that no-one has
trimmed, and then scroll to the top of that message, then scroll down as
you read it, and scroll up again to the top of the next chronological
message.  ad nauseum.

Thirdly, having the record below the message is only useful if you do not
have an email client that will adequately perform threading duties.


Dear goddess, what have I started?

A discussion on top posting.

*sigh*

Maria

[0]
A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion
Q. Why is top posting bad?

Only works if you're Mrs Cake.