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[Previous text and attributions tidied somewhat, but sequence
deliberately retained] PJ Hunt wrote: Thank you for that well thought out informative response to my post. Bob Ward wrote: PJ Hunt wrote: I'll stick to this type of posting unless someone can explain why it's better to repost the entire message at the top of my reply. That's fine - a lot of us won't see it anyway. Do you see what has happened here? Simplifying somewhat, the structure is something like: Comment 2 Original text Comment 1 Yuck! It is clearly preferable to maintain a *consistent* pattern, either *always* placing new text before old ("top-posting"), or *always* placing new text after old ("bottom-posting"). For *very good* historical reasons, the convention on Usenet is to place new text *after* the old text on which you are commenting, snipping out *surplus* old text and, when commenting on a number of fragments, placing each comment immediately after the relevant bit of the old text. This way, reading an article from top to bottom should make sense in a question-and-answer kind of way. Readers who are sufficiently familiar with the thread can skip over the quoted text, but it will generally be available for reference simply by looking a little way up the screen, rather as one sometimes looks back at the previous paragraph in a book. *One* of the reasons for quoting and commenting in this way is that Usenet articles are *not* guaranteed to arrive at a newsserver in the "correct" order - heck, they are not *guaranteed* to arrive at all - and propagation delays can be quite substantial: Google take their time even now, and once upon a time delays measured in *days* were common. In the early days of Usenet, *slow* and *expensive* net connections were very common, which made snipping out excess quoted material a Very Good Thing. Things aren't *as bad* these days, but some users are still on slowish connections where extra bytes cost extra bucks, so good snippage is still very good practice. Usenet and email are two *very* different media: Usenet is a form of *broadcast* medium where readers often find themselves dealing with fragments of *many* threads at once; email is basically a one-to-one medium (yes, spammers abuse it as a broadcast medium) in which you can be far more certain that your correspondent is already familiar with the topic of your reply, so that *appending* the previous text for reference makes more sense. That said, interleaving old and new text in email responses can be very useful - particularly where the discussion *is* a series of questions and answers. This is a bit longer than I had anticipated, but I hope you can now see why "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet. |
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