Re: OT: Safe Riddles

From: Charlie Gibbs (cgibbs_at_kltpzyxm.invalid)
Date: 01/06/05 

Date: 06 Jan 05 13:09:11 -0800

In article <zP1Dd.252385$O24.43690@news.easynews.com>,
account@domain.extension (Parse Tree) writes:

> Ed Murphy wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 18:06:32 -0600, Rhyanon wrote:
>>
>>> Top posting rocks; one can conveniently folow up a reply, at least
>>> for someone actually has the mental acumen to keep track of what's
>>> being said.
>>
>> Convenient != appropriate.
>
> You need to justify bottom posting with something. If all other things
> are equal, and top posting is more convenient, then it is necessarily
> more appropriate.

More convenient for whom? The original poster, who is too lazy to
scroll to the bottom of the quoted material because his newsreader
is too broken to put the cursor there by default? Or the thousands
of potential readers, each of whom must scroll back and forth to
make sense of a thread which is effectively written umop-apisdn?

>>> Easier to top post without scrolling through five hundred lines of
>>> rehash.

That answers my question. Thanks.

>> Failure to trim quoted material is the real problem, and bottom
>> posting is not much better than top posting (especially when
>> combined with failure to trim).

Especially when the reply is a single "me too" line. If all you're
going to do is express agreement, liberal snipping (or even a one-line
summary of the quoted text) is quite enough for you to follow up to.

And note that phrase "follow up". That implies that your reply should
follow the quoted text, not precede it. Unless you normally read the
last chapter of a book, then the previous one, until you reach the
start.

> it is easier to trim quoted material with top posting over that of
> bottom posting. That's another advantage it has.

Only if, as I mentioned above, your newsreader is broken.
(Microsoft products fit the description "broken as designed".)

> With top posting, it get's muddied trying to look through the
> attributions so that there is only a certain depth of quoted
> material. With top posting, the attribution is directly above
> the material quoted from that message, so it's very easy to trim.

So interleave your attributions. Or trim things so that there
aren't so many levels of quoted material. There's seldom any
reason to quote more than three or four levels deep. Again,
it all comes back to laziness on the part of the poster, whose
minuscule time saving is consumed many times over by readers of
his message, each of which has to go through various gyrations
to sort out the sequence of the various quotes.

>> Interleaving replies amongst trimmed material is
>> appropriate.
>
> It is only appropriate because most posters (myself included) are
> lazy, and prefer interleaving to creating multiple posts in response.

Multiple posts aren't necessary. You just address each point in turn.
The flow of the thread is left undisturbed.

I take my philosophy from the same Lewis Carroll passage I used to
use as a rebuttal to the Structured Programming zealots who wanted
to chop programs up into little subroutines jumping all over core:

    The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin,
    please your Majesty?" he asked.

    "Begin at the beginning, the King said, gravely, "and go on
    till you come to the end: then stop."

That sounds like a heck of a good way to write something;
it's certainly the natural way to read it. 

--
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