Re: Reply Top Posting

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008, M.RossARR wrote:

> While reply top posting seems wrong, it is a common habit for most
> writers. I am periodically guilty! It seems natural, the software works
> that way. Yet Matt makes a good argument concerning the Q&A becoming
> A&Q. And with multiple replies a conversation can become a mess! Who
> said what first?

The problem is that most people who top-post don't get the concept of
snipping small segments of the original message and replying to them one
at a time whilst removing what is not relevent. Instead they take the
original message as a whole and reply to it as a whole. If you're going to
do that, then there is little difference in benefit between top posting
and bottom posting. If anything, top-posting is probably better in that
circumstance because the latest response is at the top and the previous
correspondance history is just below for reference.

Top posting no doubt came about not through ignorance or use of bad email
clients, but because the classic way of replying to a letter using the
postal service or a fax machine was simply transposed into email, when
email was taken up on mass by businesses.

Academics and computer engineers came up with a superior way of
structuring emails, that allow for a more fluid dialogue that closer
emulates a face-to-face conversation than traditional written
correspondance does. But, like I say, this is about selective quoting,
segment-by-segment, not simply whether your reply goes on the top or the
bottom.

I sometimes top post from work because sometimes people EXPECT the
traditional letter style of reply, especially when I want my
correspondance to appear especially formal, which convention still
dictates this old fashioned approach to be.

So it's a matter of education really rather than laziness - people simply
don't know there's a better way, and it's not part of culture. As for the
question of cursor position, surely the cursor should be at the top in
either situation, as you'll need to go down the quotes, deleting and
snipping and replying where necessary.

James