RE: Top-Posting And Guideline 3.1

That's the same sort of thinking that parrots, "people with cognitive disabilities, do they count?  Blind people, why cater to them?  Why make the Web difficult for most users so a fraction can figure things out?" 
 
Oops.  I top-posted.  I'd fix that, but being a lazy-arsed bastard I'll just let my e-mail program do it the way millions of other users do and hope people, having experience with e-mail, will figure it out, rather than confuse the previously mentioned millions of users who are new to the Internet and don't know to look in the message body for comments.
 
Chris O'Kennon
Commonwealth of Virginia/VIPNet
Director of Portal Architecture
 
 

 -----Original Message----- 
 From: Joe Clark [mailto:joeclark@joeclark.org] 
 Sent: Tue 6/29/2004 6:22 PM 
 To: WAI-GL 
 Cc: 
 Subject: Re: Top-Posting And Guideline 3.1
 
 


 > > Enforcing a prohibition on top posting does not
 > > lead to more comprehension.
 >
 > There are many who disagree with you (hi Joe).
 
 People who don't understand E-mail, maybe. Ignoramuses and arrivistes, in
 other words. Do they count?
 
 Answers don't come after questions; we already saw the original posting;
 there are *twenty* years of experience of threaded electronic discussions
 using interleaved replies; and, to be frank, people who top-post are
 lazy-arse bastards with crappy mail programs. Why cater to them?
 
 Clearer now?
 
 > Have you seen research to back your claim?
 
 How about the fact that proponents of top-posting can never muster
 anything other than "I like it," "My software does it automatically"
 ("until user agents"?), or "People need it" as justifications. People
 *don't* need it. And there's an enormous range of documentation proving
 why top-posting is harmful.
 
 <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TrimYourPosts>: Trim Your Posts
 <http://www.xerez.demon.co.uk/usenet.htm>: Usenet Newsgroups
 <http://www.redballoon.net/~snorwood/quote-rant.shtml>: Annoying quoting
 practices rant
 <http://www.enabling.org/ia/celiac/netiquett.html#TRIM>: Email Netiquette
 Guidance
 <http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?How_to_post>: All My FAQs Wiki: How to
 post
 <http://www.amk.ca/conceit/mailing-list.html>: A Look at a Mailing List
 <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.html>: Bottom vs. top posting
 and quotation style on Usenet
 <http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html>: Why is Bottom-posting better
 than Top-posting
 <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/g.mccaughan/g/remarks/uquote.html>: The
 advantages of Usenet's quoting conventions
 
 If your screen reader can't voice quoted text correctly, get it fixed. 
 ("Until user agents"?)  Even Eudora can enunciate quoted text in a
 different voice.
 
 And the format=flowed spec, which, by curious coincidence, I wrote the FAQ
 for, adds even further structure.
 <http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html>
 
 It's insane to suggest that learning-disabled persons can understand
 answers that come before questions. How's that gonna work again?
 
 --
 
     Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
     Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
     Expect criticism if you top-post

Received on Wednesday, 30 June 2004 10:33:05 UTC