Re: [Hampshire] Benefits of top-posting?

On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:48:08 +0000
"Victor Churchill" <victorchurchill@???> wrote:

> On 23/11/2007, Jim Kissel <jlk@???> wrote:
> >
> > A: Two is fine
> > Q: How many sugars?
> > A: I'd prefer Coffee thanks.
> > Q: Coffee or tea?
> > A: Because it reverses the order in which people normally read -
> > see? Q: Why is top-posting bad
>
> I think the OP was trying to avoid going into 'top post bad'
> territory which is well trodden especially in communities like
> this. Rather, raising the (actually quite interesting) question of
> whether and why People Like Us (who Know Better) might sometimes do
> top posting.

I avoid top posting all the time and hate it when people do it to me

> What's coming out of the thread looks to me like issues of
> conformity, norms, when in Rome...

Nope, do what is correct or most suitable and ignore the conformists,
politically correctists

> None of us wants to get up other ppls noses (except possibly 1 or 2
> I can think of...) and for less-techy-oriented people we deal with
> this is just not significant. It used to be when emailing was
> mainly a technocratic activity and storage & bandwidth were big
> issues. Things move on...

Storage for me is still an issue when I only have a 30gig drive (OK I
know I could get a bigger one so no sarky comments, perleeze)
>
> Slightly wandering from the original topic: Myself, I really value
> the point-by-point interplay you get with interleaved responding,
> and I've actually managed to get some Outlurk-users to appreciate
> that.

Yep! I much prefer the style I have illustrated in this reply with
comments immediately following a point made.

Most of my emails are to genealogy lists where the correspondent
raises several issue in one email. In this sort of situation neither
top nor bottom posting is really suitable

--
John Lewis
Debian (Sid) with the GeneWeb genealogy package