Top Posting Mania [was Re: FreeBSD 7.O compiled code is very slow]

[Doug Lee]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 06:50:04PM +1100, Ian Smith wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>  > > > > On Wed, 18 Feb 2009, Kailash Kailash wrote:
>  > > 
>  > > Woj, I'm really surprised that you, of all people, seem lately to have
>  > > been converted to the Micro$oft Outlock-trained style of top-posting,
>  > > including tail-quoting all sorts irrelevant and repeated trailers etc,
>  > > after years of your (almost too- :) concise postings.
>  > 
>  > well, sorry, but i don't use M$ Outlock
> 
> That's more like it! :)

I don't either, but I will provide a different data point:  Blind
listers, myself included, must generally read through posts
sequentially, as it is usually trickier to skip reliably through
quotes to the new material when using synthesized speech to read an
email.  We therefore favor top posting as a rule, though some of us
try to adhere to a particular list's preferences. :-)

For my part, I got way tired of sifting through masses of quotes and
requotes and finally threw a little Perl script in as a Mutt display
filter:  Anyone who uses ">" to quote lines is now my friend because
my filter removes those, and I only see them on demand by opening the
body of the message from Mutt's attachment list.  Those who use other
quoting techniques still cause me some anguish. :)

So in summary, I hope people quote consistently, and I'll post at
whichever end seems most popular per list.  At least when I remember
to do so...


-- 
Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                http://www.dlee.org
SSB BART Group           doug.lee at ssbbartgroup.com   http://www.ssbbartgroup.com
"When your best-laid plans have turned to dust, vacuum!"
- Whoopi Goldberg