the-hartmans.org
Top Posters Unite!
Ever heard anyone complain about someone "top posting?" For those not
familiar with the term, top posting is the practice of replying to an
email thread where the cursor lands, at the beginning, without editting
the text. Back in the days of yore when the Internet was young, people had
lousy throughput with little if any compression. This rendered even
downloading simple text a somewhat painful experience. To help alleviate
this problem, certain unspoken rules came into being that dictated that
one must edit the original text to only include the parts that one was
replying to and post the response below. This made it easier for people
using the text-based, shell executed mail readers to follow conversations.
The readers attempted to track conversations through rudimentary
indentation and inserted combinations of spaces and greater-than symbols.
These days, those archaic methods of mail reading have been replaced
by GUI-based feature-rich mail clients capable of not only text formatting
but also inline multimedia attachements. The upstream throughput of the
typical broadband user either meets or exceeds ISDN speeds and compression
technologies achieve an average of 80-95% compression on text transfers.
These inevitable technological innovations have rendered moot all of the
reasons for "bottom posting." Let's take a look at some examples provided,
in particular the ones found on the
website,
of a gentleman from Liverpool, England. He claims three reasons for
banishing top posting:
- First, top posters tend never to snip, never to shorten that to which they
reply. So people whose download time costs money are wasting money
downloading enormous lengths of stuff they have already read.
- Second, and connected, is that you do not know with top posting
whether someone has written something else later on, so do you waste your time
going through it? Neither of these would matter if top posters snipped, but they tend not
to.
- Third, it is much easier to read things in order, and you can see with
good Netiquette how easily it flows.
Taking a look at these examples, we see in point number one, he is
concern
about download time costing money. Again with compression technologies
that exist today, downloading large amounts of text is trivial, even under
a standard v.90 56Kbps connection.
His second point claims that you do not know if someone has written
something else later on; that is no longer true. Today's mail clients will
often utilize an alternate color for replies and in many instances users
have certain fonts they've chosen to use that markedly highlight the
speaking party. Additionally, the mail clients start the reply at the
beginning and incrementally indent all previous statements for easy
following of the conversation, if you need to rereference anything. If one
were to get irritated at having to inversely catch up on a multi-response
email, odds are that person wasn't paying close enough attention to their
email in the first place. This also debunks his third point.
So, despite not-so-recent technological innovations, there are still
those out there that cling to netiquette that is decades old. Don't get me
wrong, I'm all for standing before shaking a persons hand and consider it
rude to swear in front of a lady, but in the ever-changing field of
technology, you have be open to adjustments in the way things work. I
enjoyed the convenience of using pine as much as anyone else, but that's
no reason to tout invalidated rational. So why do people like to complain
about "top posting?" I don't know. I'm real big on giving people the
benefit of the doubt, so I don't like to assume anything about a person,
but if I were to speculate, it reeks of people claiming to an outdated
standard that many these days aren't even familiar with in order to
attempt a radiated aura of ancient technological wisdom. Well, the fact of
the matter is that not only will you never be able to learn all the facets
of the computer industry, even what you do learn may well be
outdated in a matter of years.
On a side note, after checking the modification date on the referenced
page, we see Last-modified: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 23:08:22 GMT. Looks
like it wasn't modified enough.
I already stayed up later than I should've to type this up, so don't even get me started on people that post replies inline...
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