RE: Posting Guidelines: Top or bottom posting

Agree that no consensus is likely.  We might be able to usefully agree on some guidelines such as:
- If you are top posting, quote enough of the content below so that the typical reader doesn't have to read the whole thread bottom up.
- If you are interleaving, remove the irrelevant content and don't bury the substance of your comment so deeply that it's hard to find.
- Overall, respect the fact that people will be reading your message on a variety of devices, so don't make people have to scroll too far up or down to get to or understand your point.
- As Orwell famously put it "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."




From: Paul Irish [mailto:paul.irish@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:42 AM
To: Doug Schepers
Cc: Tobie Langel; public-webplatform@w3.org
Subject: Re: Posting Guidelines: Top or bottom posting

I'd prefer to not take a stand for the list. It's awkward and discourages participation.

Also I love top posting and HTML email and know folks who detest both. I don't see a useful resolution.
On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org<mailto:schepers@w3.org>> wrote:
Hi, Tobie-


On 10/17/12 12:20 PM, Tobie Langel wrote:

While on the subject of posting guidelines, are we going to take a stand
about bottom vs. top posting[1]... or leave it as an open question?
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Top-posting

I favor inline ("interleaved") or bottom posting, with liberal trimming (remove greetings and sigs, strip out any settled points or unnecessary examples).

I also take care personally to make sure that my replies are "blocked off"... I leave one space after the text I'm replying to, and 2 spaces after my comments and the next quoted block.


However, for some kinds of response, like "+1" or any kind of polling-type information gathering ("Tuesday works for me"), top-posting is just fine. It's just not great for involved responses. (In fact, I really hate scrolling down 50 lines of quoted text just to see a "+1" or minor comment, so top-posting is better there.)


My 2 cents-
-Doug