Brian van den Broek <bvande@po-box.mcgill.ca> wrote/replied to: >But I don't get the stance against top posting. You intimate that the >net savvy folks settled the issue in the same way as there is an >informed community consensus about HTML. There isn't; I guess you haven't read the list rules then. See, we don't need HTML, we just put up with a certain amount of it. Sometimes though some people need to be reminded of the rules, there ya go. >it's much more >like the old Ann Landers "which way to hang the toilet paper" debate. See, when you get to the bottom of what I am writing now, you'll know it, you're at the bottom. You don't have to scroll and scroll to make sure. I usually end with a signature to add some definite end. >What confuses me most is the idea that bottom posting is somehow >better because it allows you to avoid scrolling through needlessly >repeated material. Given that a bottom poster can get there by ctrl- >end or something similar, you're every bit as likely to have the >redundant stuff to read. At least with top posting, you see the new >before deciding to bother scrolling through the old. Well, what I do is highlight with the mouse what I want to quote, and hit the reply button at which point I have the quoted stuff sitting there with the indent I select in preferences, for me a '>', in a new message in that thread. I then put the cursor at the bottom and start typing. I may clean up and remove extra spacing or stuff before sending, but basically we're not talking about a big deal. You don't have to look far to see a top posted message with hundreds of previously quoted lines after it. Believe it or not some people actually post part of their new reply way down in the message, so scrolling all the way through the message is the only way to make sure that the top posted stuff is actually the only thing new in the message. Granted sometimes much is quoted and replies are inserted between sections, as I've done here. I often only quote a couple of lines. >But this is all coming from one of the last 4 people alive who know >how to type '<SNIP>' ;-) Actually I don't always write snip. I feel no need to say I've not presented the material in it's orginal entirety. I feel a <SNIP> is a bit of a reminder to a person who hasn't snipped. Even crude plain text email programs put quoted marks at the beginning of each line, so everyone know's what's quoted, right? Not to mention threads are kept together and you need only jump up a message or two to see the entire previous messages. If you think you have a valid reason that <SNIP> with or without the html brackets must be included by netiquette, please tell me, I don't know everything. </SNIP> - big big smiley folks - none of us knows it all, egos at the door please, have a nice day :-) Jim Davis Nature Photography http://jimdavis.oberro.com Replies in plain text only please!
