Re: [WAI-IG] list policies (top posting for vision impairments)

> Classic. I think I joined Prodigy Classic back in 89 or 90. Followed by
> CompuServe in 92. Those boards tended to have top posting so that is one of

Compuserve in the early 90s didn't have top or bottom posting.  It
had good threading mechanisms, and, because it was all centralised,
there was no risk of threads getting broken by missing articles.
As a result, at least for small articles, there was no quoting at all;
if you needed context, you just followed the thread backwards.

The real issue associated with the top and bottom posting debate
is over-quoting.  Pure bottom posting is as bad as pure top posting,
if not worse, but pure top posting makes over-quoting very easy.

People who complain about having to trawl through a lot of material
to find new material in interleaved style are normally suffering from
over-quoting.  Used sensibly, interleaved quoting avoids the need to
paraphrase the original.

In general, if you top post, you should not include the original article
and you should certainly delete articles before the last from the quotation.

Received on Sunday, 29 February 2004 13:34:31 UTC