Top posting solution

Bart Silverstrim bsilver at chrononomicon.com
Wed Aug 11 05:46:16 PDT 2004


On Aug 10, 2004, at 6:25 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> Here's a good reason to top-post: I'm referring to the message as a
> whole, rather than to the content.

What reference to a whole?  Whole what?

>
> This message came in while I was writing my previous message in this
> thread.  It shows *exactly* the points I was referring to.

What are you referring to?

> Yes, the
> reply is posted at the bottom, but the quoted text is mutilated beyond
> what anybody could have believed 20 years ago.  Your reply appears to
> refer to the last paragraph only (I suppose; I can't read the
> message), but you've (mis)quoted it in its entirety.
>

Whereas I have no idea what you're referring to now.

> A question to you: do you like the appearance of this message?

It's a very pretty message.  But it is all blah blah blah blah if I 
haven't a frame of reference for the content in question.

Whereas this way of replying reads like  conversation; moreover, 
Mail.app will highlight lines with indent marking and color so I can 
easily process what was already written visually and if I want to skip 
it, I can; if I'm reading a conversation, I can easily tell what was 
written and at what point.

>  Or do
> you do it because it's too difficult to write a tidy reply?

Top posting?  Or inline posting?  I inline because it's more like a 
conversation style.  It's PRECISE.  I know exactly what point is being 
referred to, and I would think that ambiguity is something in the 
technology field that should be AVOIDED.

You should get a new one then.

New what?  What is being referred to if the "message as a whole" is 
more than three paragraphs?  And am I right with my assumption of what 
it's referring to?

Vs.:

 >My car is a piece of crap.  $^@@# thing broke down for the third time 
today.
You should get a new one then.

AH!  Simple.  Referring to the car.  Not the dog that chewed the shoes, 
or the DVD player that has buffer problems, or anything else in the 
contrived example...

> I suspect
> the latter, and that's the point I'm trying to make.  I do
> occasionally have to use "Outlook", and I find it incredibly painful
> to use.

No, I think the latter makes it sound more like the replier has 
schizophrenia and is talking to himself.  My personal theory was that 
more literate people tend to inline post while the less literate tended 
to top-post, but I'm not in a field where I could study that theory 
conclusively. Longer top posters seem to ramble on and on, unless the 
reader scrolls down to figure out what in hell they're referring to.  
The only time I "top post" is when I'm truly sending something as 
content that shouldn't be forwarded again (a notice or memo, a story 
that should NOT be edited to understand it...and people that keep 
forwarding jokes ad infinitum, PLEASE trim the damned quoted HEADERS!!) 
as well as propagate a growing list of crud that ISN'T referred to.  
It's not a matter of pretty replies, it's laziness.  Pure laziness.  
When I want to reply to a point or question, I quote the reply or 
question portion and don't include the sigs or the random crap already 
inserted.

Let's stop trying to justify top posting for every single email out 
there and just admit it; people are lazy.  People who top post for 
*everything* are just lazy with trimming crap out.  they want to spill 
out their response and that's it.  There are some things we're lazy 
about that can be taken care of with features or protocol; for 
instance, word wrapping.  Someone is going to justify my asbestos 
underwear as I send this because I didn't word wrap at 72 characters. 
Why?!  Because I didn't keep hitting enter at "reasonable" spots.  Most 
mail readers will do it automatically. My reader doesn't.  I'm using 
Mail.app; it uses a different method for dynamically wrapping 
text...forgot what it was called already...but basically no matter what 
the display is, it'll word wrap my mail so that it appears legible 
(within reason) and if I manually insert returns, it'll look like CRAP 
as it interprets the linefeeds.  That can be taken care of by using a 
reader with this feature (it's an open standard...) and inserting the 
manual feeds reminds me of the idiots that typed up their five page 
reports in word processors by hitting enter at the end of each line and 
then inserting a word so there were stair-stepping throughout the 
entire friggin' document.  Deal with it.  That's something that can be 
taken care of by updating readers so that when the right character is 
hit, it inserts on your display a linefeed and quote character. This 
means that in the age approaching, you may be able to actually read 
your email from your system at home with the huge display, your PDA, 
and your laptop, each with different resolutions and screen sizes but 
at the same time be able to read your email without scrolling all over 
timbuktu (that's actually why Apple used this format...the company that 
started it, Qualcomm?...was coming up with a simple way for messages to 
be read on anything from regular clients to cellphone screens easily, 
as I recall from the FAQ on the subject).

But I'm afraid that where you choose to quote, inline, top, bottom, 
CANNOT be interpreted by your mail reader or any protocol.  
Unfortunately, that still takes intervention by the user, the person 
actually composing a reply.  It can *encourage* it by either starting 
your insertion point at the top or bottom and by putting in the 
prefacing "On YY date so and so thus spake:" before each reply, but 
that's it.

Outlook has this wonderful ability to mangle headers and encourage 
crappy habits to being with, and should be avoided like the plague (as 
if the virus propagation features and bloated features included in it 
that most people don't use aren't enough reason).

breathe...breathe...whew...

-Bart



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