On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 04:43 -0700, Steve Holmes wrote: > On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 05:12:31PM +0800, Ng Oon-Ee wrote: > > Probably because (in my experience at least) top-posting occurs much > > more frequently than "me too" posts at least, probably more frequently > > than improper quoting as well. > > And yet when I see the top-posted mails, most of the time I don't need > to read the rest of the previously quoted message - especially if I'm > on a roll and am familiar with the current thread. I guess if one is > reading for a historical perspective then it makes more sense to put > the reply at the bottom but then I found myself having to read the > history over and over again. If I addopt bottom posting, I plan then > to delete all but the most recent post to keep thing conscise. > Actually I'm run into *MANY* of these huge long threads in a single > message to have a "Mee to" or "+1" at the bottom That's why I found > that style to be so inefficient and wasting of my time. Honestly, I just scroll straight to the bottom, Evolution marks all the quoted stuff for me anyway so that the real replies stand out. With bottom-posting the wasted time is the amount of time taken to scroll to the bottom. With top posting the wasted time is having to scroll down for perspective. I'd wager a quick scroll is faster than having to scroll up and down to read and get perspective. However, in the end its more of a consensus thing. MLs generally agree on bottom-posting, and so top-posting in that context, whatever its merits, isn't good manners. Similarly bottom-posting my replies to my relatives "hi how are you" emails is very bad manners. To each their own. > > Actually when you think about it, most blogs are all in reverse > chronical order which to me is the same thing as top-posting and > nobody seems to complain about that concept. This is slightly off-tangent, but personally I feel blogs are less dependent on context, with each post standing on its own, whereas email threads are very context dependent as each new mail is a REPLY to the one before. Honestly, my ultimate solution would look very much like gmail's 'threaded view'. Unfortunately no desktop app that I've seen manages to get a similar handling =(.
