Pet Forum / Aquaria / Marine Reef / November 2005

Wayne Sallee <Wayne@WayneSallee.com> wrote on Sat, 26 Nov 2005:

It's difficult to understand the context.  Someone who picks up a random
article is forced to read from bottom to top, which isn't the usual direction.

Moreover, people who prefer top posting tend to be "lazy" and just include
the entire previous thread appended to the end of their message.  It isn't
always clear what point they care about or are responding to, and it takes
effort to read the whole volume of previous material to figure out what their
reply is referring to.

Whereas, in the original "bottom-posting" style, people tend to edit the
material they are replying to, and only include the part that is relevant to
their specific reply.  In addition, they usually interleave their reply with
the different parts of the individual post that they are replying to.  This
makes for much higher information density per posting, and allows people to
read each article in the natural top-to-bottom order.

Some people who prefer top-posting argue that the whole thread is included in
every message, so you can always see the entire context if you need to.
Those who prefer bottom-posting dislike the huge redundancy of constantly
copying all that text, and rely on threaded newsreaders if they want to
explore previous postings in the thread.

I'm not (in this post) arguing for one or the other, but you asked for a
justification, so there's a few.

       -- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis                      don@geddis.org          http://reef.geddis.org/
If I had a mine shaft, I don't think I would just abandon it.  There's got to
be a better way.  -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey [SNL]