Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 13:44:24 -0400
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Quoting
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

Gayle Surrette wrote:
> Except I've been top posting for the last 35 years and when I started
> top posting was the standard and in many places my last 10 jobs it
> was required for internal email.  So I have to wonder where this
> netiquette issue developed.
>
> Gayle

Once Upon A Time, there was this thing called ARPANET.  It essentially
invented the concepts of e-mail, netnews, file transfer, and most of the
other goodies we use now.  After several years of thrashing around, they
came up with the system of deleting stuff that's not relevant to what
you're replying to, marking the rest with ">" at the beginning of each
quoted line, and putting your replies under the parts that you're
replying to, and adding a "signature" at the end, marked off with a line
containing only two hyphens followed by a single space.

In short, it's been in use since the 1960s, it works, and it works well.

Near as I can tell, top-posting was invented by Microsoft; whether in
ignorance (Microsoft seems to think that they invented the computer and
everything that goes with it) or as a deliberate incompatibility (like
backslashes for directory separators), I don't know.

Top posting only works if you're using e-mail as a sort of instant
messenger, where each post is only a couple of lines.  If the mail is of
any length at all, it is impossible to tell what you're referring to in
the original post.  Interspersing replies to the quotes in a top-posted
message chain results in garble.

And that doesn't even get in to what happens on a mailing list digest
when everybody top posts and nobody trims.  Been there, done that, no fun.

As to standards, I'm a contractor/consultant -- every client has a
different set of standards, and is willing to defend them to the death.
  When in Rome ...

--
Steve Smith                                    sgs at aginc dot net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."