syntax oddities

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, May 19, 2018 at 12:30 AM, Richard Damon
<Richard at damon-family.org> wrote:
> I would divide the two communities/cultures differently. Top Posting is
> reasonable, effective and common in an environment where the primary
> recipients of the message can be assumed to have read, and likely
> remembered, the previous messages, and they are included mostly as a
> quick memory aid to remember WHICH conversation this message pertains
> with, or to a lessor extent, to help bring someone new to the
> conversation up to speed or if the message is pulled up out of an
> archive. Here the real focus is on the new content and the past record
> is mostly a 'foot note' (which is expected to be at the end). Since
> people tend to ignore the quoted material, if often ends up unedited and
> gets long (this actual is useful when someone new gets added to the
> email chain)

If people are generally going to ignore the quoted content, why have
it at all? Why not just post context-free messages that have a
reference to the rest of the conversation?

The ONLY way that the unedited quoted material is useful to someone
joining the email chain is if EVERY message is a response to the
single most recent message, and thus carries the entire conversation.
Otherwise, your email thread will branch and fork, and someone cc'd in
on a message will see only part of the thread, making it worse than
useless. The way you describe things, email is the wrong tool for the
job, and you should be using a message board of some sort.

So, no, top posting still isn't "reasonable, effective, and common" in
any environment. It might be common, but that's all.

ChrisA