[Gllug] Do modern webpages kill older laptops/PCs?

[Bruce Richardson]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 12:06:22PM +0100, James wrote:
> Would anyone care to explain to me (gently!) why all the fuss about top
> posting? I read my email using the preview pane in Evolution and its
> much easier to read if someone top-posts rather than having to scroll
> down through the quoted bit that you've read already! 

If the quoted text is irrelevant and not needed as a reminder then it
should be entirely excluded, not left as useless noise at the end of the
message.  Top-posters tend to generate threads where the useless content
grows to 95% or more of each message and wastes a lot of bandwidth
(proportionally) by repeating many times over information that nobody
cares about.  Bottom-posters are usually rather more disciplined.

> I know it was the
> norm in usenet days pre-Outlook, but why now??

The arrival of Outlook did nothing to change the arguments in favour (or
against) top posting; it simply made top-posting the default for a whole
new bunch of users.

I can give you very one practical reason for bottom-posting; most
subscribers to the more technical newsgroups and mailing lists
(certainly but not exclusively the Unix-related ones) will treat the
ability to bottom-post as a minimum intelligence bar and be much less
inclined to credit the opinions of a top-poster.

-- 
Bruce

If the universe were simple enough to be understood, we would be too
simple to understand it.
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