Please adjust your trim settings.

"karl gruber" wrote in message
...

Please, and top post!


..drawkcab gnitirw ekil s'tahT .yllis eb t'noD

No, Steve, it is not like .sdrawkcab gnitirw, it is the best way, other
than interspersed posting with spacings on your post, to get a message
across. Agreed, way back when the internet was pretty much gummint and
academia, some of the less enlightened of our brethren and sistren (or the
geeks who thought it kewl) decided that bottom posting was the way to go.
After all, that's how footnotes and bibliographies in "scholarly journals"
are done, so why not usenet too?

Because that's not how normal people respond to things. Normal people want
to see the new stuff first because they have already waded through the prior
postings. A line or two of your prior mesage at the end gets the idea
across. I wouldn't mind if that ONE SINGLE LINE of the prior message were
at the top, but that calls for a lot of self-discipline in trimming that the
vast majority of the denizens of usenet don't have. Yours truly included.
It is a hell of a lot easier to top post and then quote one or two lines to
give the idea of what is being responded to.

Jim





Please, and top post!


.drawkcab gnitirw ekil s'tahT .yllis eb t'noD

"RST Engineering" wrote in message
...

No, Steve, it is not like .sdrawkcab gnitirw, it is the best way, other
than interspersed posting with spacings on your post, to get a message
across. Agreed, way back when the internet was pretty much gummint and
academia, some of the less enlightened of our brethren and sistren (or the
geeks who thought it kewl) decided that bottom posting was the way to go.
After all, that's how footnotes and bibliographies in "scholarly journals"
are done, so why not usenet too?

Because that's not how normal people respond to things. Normal people
want to see the new stuff first because they have already waded through
the prior postings. A line or two of your prior mesage at the end gets
the idea across. I wouldn't mind if that ONE SINGLE LINE of the prior
message were at the top, but that calls for a lot of self-discipline in
trimming that the vast majority of the denizens of usenet don't have.
Yours truly included. It is a hell of a lot easier to top post and then
quote one or two lines to give the idea of what is being responded to.


Bottom posting IS the way to go. That IS how normal people respond.

("Steven P. McNicoll" wrote)
Bottom posting IS the way to go. That IS how normal people respond.


I would PREFER top posting.

In Outlook Express 6.0, I have to scroll down for every post, past all the
quoted stuff, to get to the new stuff.

However, I bow to what the majority want.

However-however, if the majority are using Ooutlook Express... g


Montblack

"Montblack" writes:


In Outlook Express 6.0, I have to scroll down for every post, past all the
quoted stuff, to get to the new stuff.

That is because the poster is too &^*&*(^ lazy to adjust his trim
setting. If {s}he has; you don't have to scroll.

(Further, a real news agent such as nn lets you skip all the
quotes.. In 'nn' I hit tab to skip quoted lines....)
--
A host is a host from coast to
& no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

On Apr 5, 2:12 pm, "Montblack" Y4_NOT!...
wrote:
("Steven P. McNicoll" wrote)
Bottom posting IS the way to go. That IS how normal people respond.
I would PREFER top posting.

North Up vs. Track Up... Forward Slip vs. Crab and Kick...

Sheesh. Be yourself.

(nice trimming, eh?)

-R

Normal people talking in a group do not repeat the entire conversation every
time they respond.

I have been a usenet denizen since 1991 and have always been annoyed by
bottom posting. But nowadays especially, the commonly used POP3 or web
email client (not a specialized usenet news reader client) expects that
you'll be looking at the content from the top down.

Making a post small is not rocket science.

LM

"Steven P. McNicoll" wrote in message
newsSaRh.21327 Bottom posting IS the way to go. That IS how normal
people respond.

"Lee McGee" wrote in message
...

Normal people talking in a group do not repeat the entire conversation
every time they respond.

I have been a usenet denizen since 1991 and have always been annoyed by
bottom posting. But nowadays especially, the commonly used POP3 or web
email client (not a specialized usenet news reader client) expects that
you'll be looking at the content from the top down.

Making a post small is not rocket science.


Agreed.

On Thu, 05 Apr 2007 14:18:37 -0700, Lee McGee wrote:

Making a post small is not rocket science.

This is true, but orthogonal to the idea of top/bottom posting.

People don't normally repeat parts of a conversation, but conversations
are normally far quicker than USENET dialog. Thus, reminders can help.

More, dialogs in person are far more interactive than on USENET. A speaks
a little, B speaks a little, etc. Because of the latency of USENET, that
doesn't work as well here. So A "speaks" (writes) a bunch, and then B
replies. Often, a given reply message actually consists of multiple
replies to multiple points made by A.

It makes sense in that case to interleave cited text with response.
Answers typically follow questions (certain TV shows excepted {8^),
so the response to a cited bit of text follows the cited bit of text.

Thus, bottom-posting.

The message with a lone citation is just a degenerate case, and shouldn't
be treated differently.

The utility of this becomes even more apparent as A (or C) replies to
B. Nested citations (trimmed as much as possible, of course) help to
retain the context for readers (esp. given that USENET is neither reliable
nor ordered), but it requires far more work to understand if the response
precedes the cited text.

- Andrew

On Thu, 5 Apr 2007 14:18:37 -0700, "Lee McGee" wrote:

Normal people talking in a group do not repeat the entire conversation every
time they respond.

No, but they don't respond to a comment two or three days later, either.

If you've got an active topic, you don't know what specific comments the poster
is responding to. Top posting is like telling the punch line of the joke
*first*.

HOWEVER...I will agree that bottom posting relies more heavily on the poster
trimming the previous comments. If you're too lazy to trim, then by all means,
top post.

Ron Wanttaja