Posting format

[davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)]

A one or two line summary at the top of an article often saves the
reader from reading the entire thing.

In article <20030723225333.GC16244@louise.pinerecords.com>,
Tomas Szepe  <szepe@pinerecords.com> wrote:
| > [Robert.L.Harris@rdlg.net]
| > 
| > While I'm anything but a qualified coder I'm willing to test code on
| > this bugger or other help where soundly possible.
| 
| Would you people please stop replying above the original messages?
| 
| One could say this evil (pioneered by certain silly mail clients btw)
| has been spreading like plague around here lately.
| 
| Quoting the lkml FAQ ->
| (REG) And please reply after the quoted text, not before it (as per RFC
| 1855).  It's very confusing to see a reply before the quoted context.

What does it say about changing the topic without changing the header?

|                                                                   And
| it's embarrassing: it makes you look like a newbie.  Change your mailer if
| necessary, if the one you have makes it hard to do reply-after-quoting.
| I know some people like to quote the entire message they are replying to,
| so they put their reply right at the top so people won't give up after the
| first page of quoted material.  Don't do it.  It's annoying.  Just learn to
| stop quoting everything.  No-one wants to see it all anyway (list archives
| allow people to see everything if they missed it).  You're not helping
| yourself anyway, as you're more likely to be ignored if you
| reply-before-quoting.

Seriously, you have a point, but his two liner did not require the
context of the bulk of the post. There have been some far worse choices
of top posting, and the main reason for not top posting is because it's
hard to read *when context is needed*.

Your point is good, I think you could have picked a number of better
examples to make it.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.