We have lost this battle, but keep fighting the good fight. We've also lost to top-posting and JavaScript.
This means that replies in-line, or below quoted text are instantly hidden and then you get complaints from the technically challenged who insist the email you sent was blank.
I tried to educate and fight back for a long time, but too many important things were lost to those who insist on writing right where the cursor appears instead of taking a moment to position it thoughtfully, and alas the rest is history.
Which is a great thing.
I know, not a popular opinion here, but top posting saves a lot of time in catching up with long email chains.
If you don't agree, pick an old style mailing-list like a Linux kernel discussion, choose a discussion with 20+ emails in and read it from top to bottom. You'll quickly realize how exhausting inline quoting is.
If context isn't required, then don't include it. Inline replies act as a forcing function, directing people to reply to the substance of what was said. That necessarily includes eliding irrelevant bits, which is often the most helpful aspect. Neither top posting nor bottom posting help emphasize substance.
In high quality forums inline posting is extremely useful for both reader and author. For the Outlook and Twitter set, it's a pointless debate.
Or you're catching up on a discussion that happened in the past, reading each email one after the other. Again, the context is secondary, so the best place is to put it below the signature. Again, top posting wins.
For these rare emails where specific answers need to be positioned below some specific context, the writer of the email needs to have the discipline to put it there, and this can be achieved with top posting as well.
Inline quoting has really no good reason to exist in most email chains.
If you don't agree, keep on reading.
hota_mazi writes:
> The fact that Gmail hides the quoted portion actually encourages people to use top posting more.
> Which is a great thing.
> I know, not a popular opinion here, but top posting saves a lot of time in catching up with long email chains.
> If you don't agree, pick an old style mailing-list like a Linux kernel discussion, choose a discussion with 20+ emails in and read it from top to bottom. You'll quickly realize how exhausting inline quoting is.
> lozf writes:
>> Gmail also had a big hand in the reduction of top posting, by hiding the quoted message by default (click the little '...' icon to see it).
>> This means that replies in-line, or below quoted text are instantly hidden and then you get complaints from the technically challenged who insist the email you sent was blank.
>> I tried to educate and fight back for a long time, but too many important things were lost to those who insist on writing right where the cursor appears instead of taking a moment to position it thoughtfully, and alas the rest is history.
>> Spivak writes:
>>> Top posting only won in places where everyone uses Outlook. Mailing lists still use quoted style.
>>> js2 writes:
>>>> We have lost this battle, but keep fighting the good fight. We've also lost to top-posting and JavaScript.
>>>> Sir_Cmpwn writes:
>>>>> Maybe the answer is to return to sending plaintext emails? HTML emails are an abomanation. Rather than extend them, just ditch them.
100a I must express myself clearly when posting. <return><esc>Almost all email clients default to top-quoting, and bottom quoting requires more work, because you need to cut out irrelevant parts. It's not easy to get people who have never bottom-quoted to start.
While certain popular webmail clients push top-posting hard, I still see a lot more inline quoting in professional contexts, even where most users are using a client biased to top posting, than I see top posting.
Edit: Ok, I found this: http://www.idallen.com/topposting.html
I'm convinced that 'bottom posting' is superior.
Top posting won for a reason: it saves everyone a lot of time.
How do you mean? I've seen bottom posting be essentially abused, by folks that quote the entire preceeding email (and even others before it) before typing their 1 line reply. Or worse, folks that quote a giant thread and insert 1-2 line responses throughout the quoting, which require the reader to hunt for them. It seems that those cases could have been avoided by just cherry picking & quoting only what you wanted to respond to.
Or is there some other situation you have in mind with your response?
Because you keep reading the same thing over and over again while all you want to do is read the new content:
===
a
===
> a
b
===
> > a
> b
c
===
The problem with top posting is that people systematically quote everything.
Inline quoting is what you just did here. It is the natural way for a discussion. The only interest of top posting is if you add new people to a thread and for them, bottom posting would be far more legible.
I'd say it's the other way around.
Top posting fixes the problem of people quoting everything since everything is put below the signature.
The problem with inline quoting is that people quote entire paragraphs, even when they only mean to respond to a single sentence. Which leads to deluges of quoted text you have to scroll and scroll through until you reach the new content.
With Gmail and a top posted email discussion, I can catch up with the entire discussion with "n", read a few lines, "n", read a few lines, ... With inline quoting, catching up on such a discussion is exhausting.
The main evidence for this is that where I work (and surely in other places well), people who use Outlook end up re-inventing inline quoting, badly. They write their answers inline and use coloring to distinguish them because Outlook has no proper quoting support.
And the reason is quite simple: if each mail in a thread is only a small number of sentences, then top posting is fine. However, when you're trying to do serious technical work via email, replying to specific points is necessary. Inline quoting is simply the best way of clearly indicating which part of the original email you're replying to.
If you need to give more context in your reply, you can quote a line or two in the above of your text. This is usually only needed for long messages. An example:
> This is a snipped from the message being replied to, i.e. quote.
> Just a line or two to give some context.
This is your text, where you you address the above concern. [More text...]
> Another quote regarding some other issue.
Your text here. The rule of thumb is to keep the quote shorter than your text.
Otherwise it is a huge pain.