[ale] OT: top-posting

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2009 11:33:35 -0500
Paul Cartwright <ale at pcartwright.com> wrote:

> I like the intermingle method.. I top post to my M$ Lookout users..
> they expect it. I think people demand too much from users.. you NEED
> to do it THIS WAY.. blah...blah.. If there was only ONE WAY to do it,
> no problem. Since there is always a different way to skin a cat, I
> find the method that suits me, and I use it. I personally don't care
> what method YOU use....whatever floats yer boat:)

I spent a long time ago thinking about how to write messages in a way
that is polite, and arrived at the conclusion that the general idea of
interweaving replies (or bottom-posting, if interweaving is impractical
due to lack of message length) is much easier.

When I was in school, in the newsgroups and mailing lists for the place
that I was at, there was a lot of disagreement.  The expectation was to
top-post, quote the entire fscking thread, and use HTML, flashy colors,
and the like.  It's a stupid waste of bandwidth.  Of course, I got
yelled at for this.  Still, the only thing I changed was to use HTML,
because their stupid mail system couldn't handle plain-text emails.
Then again, it couldn't handle electronic signatures, and misbehaved
horribly if you sent a MIME message that included character set
information for text attachments (it would interpret them as part of
the filename, in gross violation of the standard).  I'm not sorry to
sound elitist when I say that such systems should be wiped off of the
face of the Internet---follow the standards or begone, IMHO.

Just because we have tons more bandwidth than we had years and years
ago doesn't mean that we can shamelessly waste it.  Bandwidth,
*somewhere* along the line, costs money---and for mailing lists and
newsgroups, that money is a lot more than a private conversation.  If
you quote the entire thread to a mailing list that has even just 500
recipients, and the message you send is 60K, you have caused the usage
of at least 60,000K of bandwidth, not counting the hops that the mail
travels, just the first hop (from the mailing list manager, assuming it
cannot or does not batch the mail in any way) and the last hop, to each
recipient.

That's horribly impolite.

And with HTML (yuck) it's really not unreasonable for a mail thread to
be 60K, considering that some people I know send HTML messages out that
by themselves are pushing 10K because they embed graphic images (or
worse, ANIMATED graphic images) in the stupid thing ("Look at my stupid
animated smiley faces," and so forth).

The top vs. bottom-posting war is as old as open access to the Internet
is, and older even.  It's more visible these days for no other reason
than more newbies that can't be bothered to trim and reasonably reply
are around than ever.  Not surprisingly, most of them are American.
Just like electricity, paper, food, and anything else we can consume,
if bandwidth is there to consume, why the hell not, right?

	--- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
http://www.trausch.us/
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