Moonlit wrote:
I like to toppost so you don't have to scroll all the way down (personally I
really hate that).
Nobody cares what you personally like or dislike. Personally, I prefer
driving on the right side of the road. Try explaining that to a police
officer in Japan.
Having to scroll all the way down is a symptom of another breach of
netiquette: the author has quoted way too much material before starting
the first original line of text.
I don't like top posting, but I do it in my work correspondence,
because that's how it's done by users of Outlook and Exchange.
Why do you think replies 'belong following or interspersed'?
One reason is that it's the way it has been done on Usenet since before
1980. There are other reasons, of course, but that's a very good good
one.
A second reason is consistency. If everyone follows the same
conventions, it's better than if conventions are randomly patched on
top of each other in a chain of replies, with each nesting level
defining its own flow order. The article as a whole, regardless of how
many levels of quoting it contains, should flow in one direction, be it
bottom to top, or top to bottom.
One benefit to consistency is that software can parse the structure of
an article body and render its structure in alternate ways. Some of the
things good news reading software can do is fold up the quoted text, or
automatically jump to the first piece of original text so that no
scrolling is required to begin reading.
Interspersing of replies is necessary in order to associate related
points together by proximity and flow direction. For instance, here it
is obvious that my three paragraphs pertain to the "Why do you
think..." sentence above, because they are inserted beneath it.
Top-posting e-mail or forum cultures never seem to have a
well-developed way of doing this. People switch to interspersed
replying when they want to address specific points.
Let everyone post the way they like, think about freedom instead of imposing
your will on others.
This is a newsgroup related to computer programming. Is this your
attitude in team programming also? Everyone on the team follow his own
conventions? That's one way code turns into tossed salad.
PS: You can probably add me to your kill list or just don't read my posts
(and really you don't have to tell me that you did).
So you'd rather be killfiled for failing to follow some simple
conventions than to follow them?
