Bob Phillips said:
Top-posting is no lazy per se Harlan.
Stipulated. But the lack of snipping the quoted preceding thread IS lazy.
As I keep pointing out to bottom-poster evangelists, my experience of
people who use NGs regularly (and let's be honest, to those that don't,
the argument is immaterial) is that they follow a thread by monitoring it,
reading responses as they come in, just as you are doing here. As such,
when a response comes in, I don't want to have to scroll through a whole
heap of responses, counter responses etc. that I have already read. I want
to get to the meat of what is being said, and by top-posting, that aids me
enormously. . . .
So don't quote anything. It's a simple Outlook Express setting. With nothing
quoted, you could adopt the logically valid (if meaningless) position that
you're both top-posting and bottom-posting.
And it's quite clear the universe of newsgroups you follow is pretty
limited. Granted top-posting is most common in the Office newsgroups, but
it's infrequent in the microsoft.* programming language and Windows
newsgroups, and rarer still in true USENET newsgroups. What should one make
of that? That people who only know how to use Office can't figure out how to
use newsgroups and/or newsreaders properly? Certainly a possibility.
. . . If I do need to refer back, I can easily scroll down, or read the
previous postings. I see no merits in bottom posting at all.
Context is everything. So, like small children, instant gratification is
essential for you?
As far as I can tell, most of your argument relates to not snipping posts,
just adding a response to the responses already accumulated in the thread
to date. This is not a peculiarity of a top-posting, it is just as easy to
do in bottom posting.
Just as EASY, perhaps. Just as COMMON?
While there are isolated instances of bottom-posters failing to snip
anything from the full quoted preceding thread, snipping is far more
commonly done by bottom-posters than top-posters.
I agree with your dismay at this, but I own up to doing it myself, and
quite honestly top-posting makes it almost irrelevant (even helpful if you
do want to look back in the thread). . . .
Helpful how? The response is out of context.
But guess what, you do it yourself, nobody is perfect.
Yes, when the message to which I'm replying is brief, I don't bother
snipping. Provide a link to a thread in which I responded to a message of 20
or more lines without snipping some of it.
None of us may be perfect, but some of us are much closer to it than others.
