From: floyd@... (Floyd L. Davidson) Date: 2006-09-01T20:40:32+09:00 Subject: Re: Off topic: What is "top posting" ?? Brad Peek wrote: >What is "top posting" and why is it considered bad form? What an interesting set of "answers" you are getting, eh? Let me provide a bit more detail, and some history, to put it into better perspective. (Okay... a *lot* more!) First, "top posting" is a valid description of that style, but "bottom posting" confuses people as to what it means. It does *not* mean to quote an entire article and then place a response after the entire quote. (That is called "Stupid posting"!) Keep in mind that Usenet was begun in late 1979 by programmers, and that at the time they mostly had 300 baud modems to tranfer messages, using the Unix-Unix-Copy-Protocol (UUCP). The essential ingredients are that each message cost money by the minute to transmit, and it happens as a batch process done late at night. (It cost money! And the other guy answered the next day, and two days later you got to read his response.) Many of the messages were very technical, it was highly academic in style, and initially not very "social" as such. And Usenet was populated mostly by people who were exceedingly logical, often to a fault. The style that very quickly became *clearly* the best, also related to the very common practice of long running threads that referenced comments made over a series of exchanges, some of which were important in context and some of which were not. The "basic rules" becames, 1) Delete all quoted text unnecessary to the point you are making. 2) Prefix each line of quoted text with a '>' character, and mark each level of quoted text with an initial attribution line that identifies who authored each level. That results in a long running exchange that follows this form: John Doe III wrote: >Jane Doe III wrote: >>Joe Blow wrote >>>Jane Que wrote >>> >>>>My name is Jane, >>>>the sun is up. >>>> >>>Well my name is Joe, and >>>the sun is down here. >>> >>My name is also Jane, >>what is a sun? >> >I'm John Doe, who >is Jane? My response to all of that goes here. 3) Not obvious from item 2) is that this format is applied at a minimum to _paragraphs_, but often to sentences or even just to individual lines or fragments. Very rarely should there be multiple paragraphs retained as quoted text with a comment at the bottom referencing anything more than a paragraph above where it is placed. A) The other paragraphs should either be deleted, or B) The comment that references other paragraphs should be immediately below the referenced paragraph. The whole point is to reduce the size of the message to a minimum (which reduced the cost to transmit it around the country) and to maintain a geographic relationship between a comment and the relevant quoted text that it applies to, which in turn provides the reader with a temporal relationship that is both ordered (read the "question" before the "answer") and uncluttered by intervening material. One of the primary reasons for all of the above, but particularly for that temporal relationship, was simply that in virtually all cases a response would be read *two day later*, at a minimum. A secondary reason was that the typical Usenetizen was indeed academic, and typically well aware that there were other environments where one might read a message than just the one that the writer was experiencing. It is therefore incumbent upon the *writer* to transfer as much environment and as little ambiguity as possible. Today we have major differences in the participants and the mechanisms being used. These differences do not necessarily negate the advantages of the format that was worked out, but they make it less likely that a person new to Usenet will quickly see the point of using the apparently quirky "Usenet Format". The need for brevity as a cost saving factor is no longer applicable, other than as an certain bit of aesthetics. Readers using Google Groups, or even a Web Browser and an NNTP server, simply will not realize that their reading environment is *different* than many others. They do not imagine that what appears to make "paragraphs" quite visibly distinct on their screen has exactly the opposite effect on the readers that a majority of the readers will use, as one example. Likewise Usenet, way way back in the good old days *very* quickly moved away from a strickly business atmosphere, and became a social event too. Today's average Usenet writer is not an academic, and may or may not be more logical, artistic, or simply dull too! Hence we see all sorts of not particularly "smart" posts, just as we do with all walks of life. Top Posting has become acceptable in some places... but you should never forget that it also marks the writer as less than astute. It messes up the temporal relationship for readers who did not just immediately read the previous referenced message. It also makes following the attributions of a multiexchange thread difficult. Stick with an /appropriate/ formatting style, and write with the assumption that a reader who will see your article 20 years from now will be your child or grandchild. -- Floyd L. Davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@apaflo.com