Top Posting....

[Jeff Kinz]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 03:41:49PM -0500, Phil Labonte wrote:
> It's time to embrace change, change is good. Top posting gis here to
> stay especially because of GMAIL and outlook...

Top posting is used only by a minority of people in this list. It is not
used AT ALL in the Linux Kernel mailing list and that holds true for
almost all of in the many many email lists supported by RedHat, ditto
for Sourceforge.

In general the only email lists where top posting is considered OK are
non-technical lists, or lists where the majority of users are clueless
newbies and AOL users.

Given all the fuss, you might consider trying to understand why the
standard of appropriate quoting evolved.  Here are some hints:
	#1 - complex and lengthy technical discussion
	#2 - Store and forward email is not a real time application
	#3 - immediacy of context
	#4 - the time of the many is more valuable than the time of the
	     few.

This is covered in the IETF Engineering documents:

See RFC 1855 - Netiquette Guidelines, section 3, "One-to-Many Communication":

"- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough
text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers
understand when they start to read your response."


-- 
>From "The Jargon file" aka 
The New Hacker's Dictionary. MIT Press; 3rd edition. ISBN 0262680920.

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html:

The September that never ended

    All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the
Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who,
lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves.
This coincided with people starting college, getting their first
internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was
acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be
assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became
able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to
acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before,
this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on
newsgroups. Syn. eternal September. See also AOL!.


http://kinz.org
http://www.fedoranews.org
Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.