* Bnonn <bnonn(a)orcon.net.nz> [2005-04-08 02:00]:
Could someone explain why top-posting is bad?
A late note, since I didn’t see this argument after catching up with the list fully: A: Because it reverses the natural flow of text. Q: Why is top-posting bad? The only purpose of quotation is to let a reader follow a message when they didn’t read the preceding message, or did so a long time ago (as is the case with this mail). Reconstructing the context by reading a message quotation-wise bottom-up (while reading top-to-bottom inside the quotations, of course) is annoying. Note that top-posting is tolerable, even if suboptimal, as long as it is consistent. What is a complete faux-pas is mixing styles. The result is an unreadable spaghetti mess[1]. Don’t top-post in reply to a message with interleaved quotes. Don’t interleave your reply into top-posted quotation. Stick with the existing style or lose the quotation. The bottom line is courtesy and respect towards your readers. [1] Incidentally, it very much resembles reading GOTO-heavy code. This is no coincidence: human brains are miserable at dealing with temporal as opposed to spatial arrangements. Regards, -- Aristotle “If you can’t laugh at yourself, you don’t take life seriously enough.”