Netiquette - bottom posting - outdated?

[Mark Rogers]

On 19 July 2013 09:46, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
> On 19 July 2013 09:14, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:
>>
>> Those rules of basic consideration don't
>> just go back to 2003; they go back to the 1980s or even beyond.
>>
> +1000

+1000 from me too.

Note how clear it is that (a) David made an initial comment, (b) how
Alan replied to it and (c) how I replied to that, maintaining context
in full without losing or obscuring anything. Consider the same
conversation with top-posted replies, each including the full body
(and doubtless pages of disclaimers and other rubbish), and looking
only at the final email in the chain tell me that it is easier to read
and make sense of than the above?

Top posting "works" when your entire reply is a single answer to an
entire email which was itself a single question. That's pretty rare,
and in that situation bottom posting works just as well, and indeed
better if the reader can't recall the original message (eg because it
wasn't the last thing they read before the reply).

Even when top posting could be argued to make sense, including any
additional "gumph" is a pain. How often do you have to scroll through
pages of signatures and disclaimers to read the bits of history that
are relevant?

Signal-to-noise ratio is a useful concept. If you look at entire email
(including all the previous replies that might be included in it), how
much of it is actually "signal" and how much "noise"? What would you
consider an acceptable ratio? You'd probably watch TV if it the
content:advert radio was 99:1%, but would you still at 75:25? How
about 25:75? check out a typical long email that includes top-posted
replies with a long chain of included past emails and I doubt you'll
get anywhere near 25:75, probably more like 10:90. And if you counted
repeats as "noise" rather than content you'd be nearer to 1:99 that
99:1.

HTML emails, by comparison, are a non-issue. If HTML emails just added
a bit of formatting capability rather than being a mechanism to add
tonnes of needless rubbish they'd probably be accepted by now. But
given how much of rubbish gets added (much of which you can't see
without viewing the source, but it still has to be archived, indexed,
managed, transferred over bandwidth that someone has to pay for)
blocking HTML is a necessary evil too for mailing lists.

Unfortunately, having to properly edit emails and not use HTML is made
hard by modern email clients, such as Outlook, that have their own
agenda. Outlook, ultimately, wants to make sure that any email you
send only looks right to a recipient who uses Outlook. Great
commercial sense, terrible abuse of standards. It was Outlook that
(from memory) decided pretty unilaterally that top posting was the way
to go, and a lot of other clients (eg Gmail that I'm using here) have
sadly copied it. I have never seen anyone make a good reasoned
argument for top posting, other than "because it's easiest".

This is all largely off-topic here, but I would add that in an
environment where people are posting logs and other detailed emails
which often contain multiple points to discuss, the simple concept of
removing content that's not relevant (eg 100 lines of logs to focus on
the two that turn out to be relevant) and answering inline with the
questions is *much* easier to read than the equivalent content
top-posted. If you look at the list emails, you'll find that the most
helpful replies are almost always posted "properly", and if you look
at them you'll see that it's not just because that's how those people
choose to reply, but it actually adds value to the conversation to
make it easier to understand. Seriously, go back and look at some of
the messages from dinkypumpkin and others and tell me that the reply
style isn't more than just "style over substance".

Mark
(PS: Short, properly separated (ie easily removed) signature follows,
another useful piece of netiquette....)
--
Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450
Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG