I think this is worth spending a moment on, because the subject and its
context are often misrepresented (however unintentionally).
Post by ChesterOn Fri, 16 Dec 2005 04:45:53 GMT, Joanna Tsang Ramberg
Post by Joanna Tsang RambergPost by Mean Green Dancing MachineBTW, is there some reason you're top-posting?
No reason... Why? Did I miss some sort of an posting
etiquette rule? (Switching to bottom in case I am...)
Yeah. Every once in a while, people get chided for it.
. . .
Anyway: general etiquette, for those who care, is that one posts below
quoted text.
-- Since about 2000, that is, and the particular generation of news reader
software that elevated this issue and got under some people's skin.* You
can even check (if you are unusually patient and open-minded) and learn that
this etiquette mostly concerns relatively recent (few-year) rather than
longtime posters, though with exceptions. (Further history reprised below,
whose upshot is that the issue did not exist for the first 20 years of
newsgroup history but surfaced only in the last five, among populations and
software active in this interval.)
Post by ChesterAn important corollary to this rule is that one prunes quoted text to
provide only the necessary context.
That principle is very important and goes deep, appearing not just in
RFC1855 (published 1995, and which anyone seeing this has presumably read,
or can easily read, being as it's roughly the Strunk and White of online
fora, cited by almost every related tutorial ever written) but long before
that, in standard net-etiquette guidelines posted publicly from 1982, which
evolved to RFC1855. The principle appears separately in multiple parts of
RFC1855 (such as 2.1.1, 3.1.1., and 3.1.3). As a further note of possible
net-historical interest, some people in the last few years have tried to
read anti- "top posting" advice into RFC1855 retroactively. Though this is
partly absurd given that RFC1855 predated the "top posting" concern by about
five years,* the granule of truth in it is worth amplifying. 3.1.1 pph 10
proposes constructively (not proscriptively like the anti- "top posting"
admonitions) that people should summarize past-posting context at the
beginning of a reply. To fully "get" that pph though (in the way that the
rhetorical exploitation of it does not), you must appreciate the variable
transit times that plagued newsgroup postings for the 15 years preceding
RFC1855. Simultaneous postings routinely arrived hours, or days, apart (the
familiar "time warp," which slowly faded). Thus people would often see
replies before the originals, and others would not understand what someone
replied to. The RFC1855 paragraph itself summarizes its point: "Giving
context helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!"
Apart from all this background, some people lately don't like "top posting"
and will complain. According to RFC1855 (and also in my opinion) the more
serious issue is when postings omit needed context or (more often today)
stupidly include huge past articles intact to add a few lines of reply.
Here I mean the ancient sense of stupid, as in stupor, or daze.
Hope this helps! -- Max
"Content of a follow-up post should exceed quoted content." -- RFC1855
--------
*Re-posted from some time ago on rec.food.cooking (words are mine):
(This article is not an example of that but of embedded quotation, one of
several venerable formats preceding that issue.) . . . Prior to late 1999,
most references to "top post" in the Google archive have unrelated meaning,
such as the top post of the week.