[rescue] Top vs. Bottom posting

[Mouse]

> Email is always ASCII.

On this list, and a few others, yes.  Otherwise...not always.  I not
infrequently use 8859-1, and routinely receive UTF-8 and occasionally
other non-ASCII character sets.  (Indeed, until I made my mailer reject
them, I routinely received Microsoft something-or-other mislabeled as
8859-1.)

> 95% of the time I always top post.

If you don't mind the rudeness it conveys, well, it's your reputation.

> I neither want, nor need to read the old information.  It is already
> my responsibility to be on-top-of and know what is transpiring in the
> discussion.

That's fine...for you.  But for you to be willing to impose such a
"responsibility" on all your correspondents?  That just...rude.  I get
enough mail that it really does help to have each mail remind me of
what conversation it belongs to and, since mail not infrequently
arrives out of order, where it fits into the conversation.

Yes, six pages of cascaded quotes followed by two lines of new text is
a pain.  That's what trimming is for.

http://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/mouse/blah/2012-09-26-1.html is a blah
post of mine which links to a piece I wrote explaining why top-posting
comes across to me as rude.  The teal deer is "if you can't be bothered
to take a few moments to make it easy to read, why should I be bothered
to take the time to read it?".

> I have left/voluntarily unsubscribed from other list that have
> attempted to force the bottom post issue.

Sounds like a good resolution of such a case.  I know I would be
unlikely to put up with a list that insisted on untrimmed top-posting.

> Apparently it (bottom posting) made some sense back on Usenet decades
> ago, [...]

I don't recall ever seeing anyone seriously defend bottom posting, not
even back in the heyday of Usenet in the '80s.  The two major camps
I've seen are untrimmed top-posting and trimmed inline.  (You are the
first person I recall seeing mention top-posting with trimmed quotes;
it's possible I've seen someone do it and not realized it, because I
tend to skim top-posts at best and stop even skimming when I first see
quoted material.)

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