From: Mike DiFebbo <medifebbo_at_rcn.com>
Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2007 08:47:19 -0500

Tyler Wood wrote:
> That's another thing.
Your e-mail is a perfect example of the problem with top-posting and
overquoting. Your message was top-posted, and you quoted all or parts
of at least three other posts. It is impossible to tell what you are
responding to. Since I view these forums in a threaded view, I can
tell that your e-mail was in response to Nathan Hevenstone's post, but
that would not have been immediately obvious to me if I weren't using a
threaded view. For example, I often read this list on my Treo
smartphone, where I do not have a threaded view and it is inconvenient
to flip back and forth among messages in a thread or to scroll up and
down to try to get a context for a particular post.

My response to you, on the other hand, quotes the exact part of your
message that I am responding to, so anyone reading this, regardless of
their e-mail client, can easily follow the discussion. Moreover, I
quoted only three words of your post, which is enough to give context to
my response, but which should not cause any difficulty for people with
screen readers or for any of the other reasons that have been raised in
this discussion.

The more important issue, however, is consistency. Regardless of the
relative merits of top-posting and bottom-posting, it is *impossible* to
follow a discussion when the two are mixed, particularly when they are
mixed with messages that quote excessively and do not offset the quotes
from replies. In my opinion, there is NO valid reason to disregard the
protocol that the moderators of the list have decided upon, and in this
case, the protocol is (a) to post under the message to which you are
replying, and (b) to quote only that portion of the message that is
necessary to put your reply into context.
Received on 2007-03-03