Dave Chand posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
excerpted below, on Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:58:42 -0400:
> On Aug 19, 2005, at 2:02 PM, Duncan wrote:
>
>> Sigh... top posting, even on the PAN list...
>
> I am sorry what does "top posting mean"??
>From an unknown origin:
A: Top posters.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet?
This is "bottom posting", contextual quote (snipping the upline not
replied to), then reply, in the context of the quote. You did "bottom
posting" as well, when you asked that question.
"Top posting" would put the reply first, without any previous context
quoted demonstrating what was replied to. The quote, if any, is
underneath, often not trimmed at all, even if the thread gets many levels
and several hundred lines deep, because it's below the reply, so there's
not the incentive to trim it to context only, as there is if the quote has
to be scrolled thru to get to the reply.
Your first reply, to yourself, was top posted, so the context of what you
were replying to, and therefore what I was replying to when I quoted it,
before I manually rearranged things, wasn't clear.
Of course, it's equally annoying to have to scroll thru 200 lines of quote
to get to what might be a two line reply, so bottom posting alone isn't
always better. The key is quoting only the context one is replying to.
If the context is more than 20-ish lines, ideally, one either replies
inline (point-by-point and again editing out extraneous context), if one
is replying to multiple points, or edits it down to the context replied
to, or if that's still to large, summarizes as necessary.
PAN of course discourages top posting by warning about it and asking if
you are sure, as one of the GNKSA guidelines it complies with. (The fact
that PAN is 100% GNKSA compliant is a major point of pride to the PAN
developers, and for good reason. Check the GNKSA link on the PAN site for
more info.)
Besides the GNKSA link, here's another link, explaining a bit more about
top posting vs bottom posting. (The A:/Q: quote above is from the FAQ of
proper quoting link at the bottom of this page, tho I've also seen it
quoted in people's sigs occasionally.)
http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/gey_stv0.htm
How you reply in your own person-to-person email is your own
business, tho I personally prefer top-quoting/bottom-posting there
as well. However, mailing lists such as this one are very similar to
USENET, being a one-to-many medium such as a newsgroup, and should be
treated similarly. In fact, I read and reply to this list /as/ a
newsgroup, thru the list2news gateway available at gmane.org.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html
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