[Wylug-discuss] List Etiquette: Top Posting vs. Bottom Posting

[Mark P. Conmy]

On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, Roger Greenwood wrote:
> 
> So far no one seems to have spelled out the advantages of top posting,
> which I see as :-
>
> 1. Most of the world seems to do it that way already (like it or not)
> out of lazyness/default mail program (as was pointed out already). The
> exceptions seem to be techie groups like this.

Not a good argument.  "Most of the world" is a plea to disband WYLUG
since most of the world uses Windows.  Problem solved.

> 2. You can read the reply immediately without scrolling - my finger
> hovers over the delete key when reading mail. If you have to read the
> whole message again to remember the context then go ahead - scroll.

But not if you don't have the context (see my other post).  If you don't
have the context, you have to scroll all the way down and then back up
again.  If the quoted text is appropriately snipped, you can pretty much
read (the start of) the reply without scrolling anyway.

> 3. More usable on mobile devices - I don't want to download the whole
> 10k message to read a 10 word sentance (and yes HTML/XML bloat
> messages make this much worse, but we can save that argument for
> another day).

Neither IMAP nor POP downloads line-by-line.  POP will download the
whole message whether you read it or not, IMAP might be able to save
time by splitting headers and body, but it will still download the whole
body if you start to read a message.  You might save some time (assuming
you never have to read context) with a webmail browser, but you won't
save bandwidth.  This is a non-argument.

> If the reply is more than a sentance, or to multiple points then I
> agree with many others - snip away.

The snipping is more a problem with the quote not the reply!

Mark