Re: To The Critics Here ---

From: Lyn (lhancock_at_ihug.com.au)
Date: 01/25/05 

Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 16:50:48 +1100

Thanks Terry, your response was quite concise. It seems that there are
valid pro's and con's for both top and bottom posting.

I think that the reason I usually top post is that a posting is like
replying to an email -- in emails you normally put your reply at the top of
any part of the email that you are replying to (at least in the business
world that I belonged to this was so). Indeed, mail clients that I have
used default the cursor to the top when replying, so it is easy and natural
to reply this way. And some of these mail clients are also news clients
which also put the cursor at the top. As someone pointed out, top posting
makes it easy to browse quickly through a thread via the preview pane to get
the gist without having to scroll every message.

OTOH, bottom posting forces the poster to scroll to the bottom (unless they
use Ctrl-End) and in doing so they get the opportunity to trim the original
posting which with top posting they may forget to do.

Perhaps the most important thing in this issue (which I don't think anyone
has mentioned, apologies if I am wrong), is not to MIX top and bottom
posting in a long thread! I have seen examples of this and it is most
confusing to follow the thread. I think that the rule should be that if an
established thread is either top or bottom, additional postings should
respect that -- unless the original postings have been trimmed to the point
that it doesn't matter anymore.

Thanks to all who responded, I think I have a better understanding of the
issues and will try to keep these in mind with future postings. 

-- 
Cheers,
Lyn.
"Terry Kreft" <terry.kreft@mps.co.uk> wrote in message 
news:LqKcnWuTHd-GnWjcSa8jmw@karoo.co.uk...
> Lyn,
> People can get quite vehement about top and bottom posting.
>
> Essentially theadvantage of consistent bottom posting is that you can read
> through the posts in sequence.
>
> The advantage of top posting is that when you use a preview pane the
> previewed content tends to be the last post.
>
> On the subject of trimming, you should really trim previous posts to what 
> is
> relevant to your post, in the past people could get quite nasty about not
> trimming posts, this has become less of an issue though since the advent 
> of
> fast internet links and large storage space.
>
> Personally I'm a rabid top-poster and trim when I remember to do so,
> speaking of which
>
> -- 
> Terry Kreft
> MVP Microsoft Access