In defense of top posting (sort of)
Wed 11 Jul 07 23:47 | Tags: Internet
John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame posted an article yesterday entitled Non-Top-Posting Reply Scripts for Apple Mail. Gruber provides an AppleScript which helps users of Apple's Mail app avoid top posting, which he brutally dubs "an uncouth and illiterate practice."
Top posting is the practice of replying to a message online - for the sake of simplicity, we'll specifically say an email - with the quoted text of the original message below the new content. It is the default behavior of Apple Mail, as well as Microsoft's Outlook and Google's Gmail, to place the cursor in a blank line at the top of a quoted message when initiating a reply, thus encouraging this behavior.
Top posting. My text is black; the quoted text is blue.
However, many people, Gruber included, think it's a mortal sin to reply to email in such an illogical manner; that is, with the newer information located above the older information on the page, contrary to any written language on earth. In the heyday of Usenet and mailing lists, posting with this behavior would likely garner you a mild reprimand by other readers, at the very least.
Nonetheless, the popularity of top posting in email today is undeniable. And I don't think it's necessarily bad in all circumstances. Before I explain why, though, let's look at the alternatives.
Bottom posting.
The traditional behavior of previous generations of email clients, such as the faded classic Eudora and the killed-before-its-time Claris Em@iler (not to mention old text-mode Unix clients), was to place the cursor after the quoted message, but before the signature block. When the user then wrote the reply, the new information would be below the older information, as is logical. Gruber's AppleScript essentially forces Apple Mail to function in this manner, with one unfortunate distinction; Gruber's script will place the cursor below the signature block as well. So a few keystrokes or some mousing will still be necessary in order to get the cursor in the "right" place for bottom posting (unless you don't use a signature).
Middle posting.
However, between top posting and bottom posting, there's a third, superior alternative. It doesn't have a definitive name - call it interleaved posting, inline posting, or even middle posting. In this method, you dissect the quoted message into ideological chunks, then write your reply to each chunk below it. Usually deleting parts of the quoted message that don't warrant a reply goes along with this, though this can be dangerous as you may not know what parts of the message seem irrelevant now but may be relevant in the future, to either you or the other conversant. Even more than bottom posting, this is - and was - the preferred method for replying to messages among many on Usenet and mailing lists, as well as web-based forums, their hip modern cousins. It saves space by not repeating the entire message, while at the same time making it easy to clarify just which part of the message you are addressing when you write your reply. This is the type of style I use for all my long-form electronic correspondence, whether personal or professional.
Therefore, Gruber's script doesn't help me much. It deletes the annoying blank line at the top, but it then puts the cursor at the bottom of the message - below the signature, even. In order to middle post, I have to track backwards through the message, either via mousing or the arrow keys, in order to get the cursor in place right after the first part of the quoted message I wish to reply to. The message doesn't have to be very long before this creates a situation where it's causing me to do more mousing/keying than it's saving. I'd rather have the cursor be in place at the top of the message, so I can track down the the first point in the quote I want to reply to. And as for the annoying blank line at the top… Sometimes I'll delete it, and other times I just won't worry about the easily-ignorable extra byte it's adding to the size of my message.
So if I think that middle posting is superior, why am I defending top posting and the email clients that facilitate it? Because in my job, I'm often having to deal with technical novices; people who don't know that top posting is traditionally bad form. Or maybe they do know, but can't be bothered to go through the extra effort that formatting an email for middle posting requires. (These would be the same people that can't put forth the extra effort to use the Shift key, for example. Mr Echo42, I'm looking at you.) Perhaps Gruber, as a professional tech pundit, is somewhat insulated from these sorts of people, but this is everyday conversation for our clients. These non-tech-savvy people are just going to do whatever their email client sets them up to do. And since email clients can't format a reply message for middle posting by automatically breaking a message into chunks and deleting irrelevant info (though this would probably be an interesting but ultimately futile artificial intelligence experiment), this means that they're going to either top post while quoting the entire message, or bottom post while quoting the entire message. So the question then becomes this; am I, as a reader, going to want to receive a message with the new information right there at the top and my previous message (which I can presumably still recall) below it, or one in which I have to scroll through my quoted message before getting to the new stuff? I obviously prefer the former.
I understand that top posting is counter-chronological, and I would still find it odd to see it being done on an online forum. However, with email, which is typically a person-to-person form of communication where the subject line is often enough to remind one of the current thread and direction of conversation (not to mention one more likely to be used by novices), I just can't get too worked up about it. It'd be great if everyone middle posted in their email replies, but since that's not going to happen, I'd rather they send me top posts than bottom posts.
Sending HTML- or RTF-formatted messages instead of plain text, however, should be punishable by death.
For more info about top, bottom and middle posting, see Wikipedia's article on posting style. Checking through the replies to Gruber's post through Technorati, most of them seem to be in agreement with me, though (with one exception) they've all spent significantly fewer words than I have to say so. One person in agreement, however, went so far as to tweak Gruber's script to support signatures. Gruber himself has posted a follow-up in which he seems to show support for middle posting, though, as I said above, I can't imagine how his script would be of much use for that. (UPDATE: It appears he also updated his original post to mention the problem with signatures.)
This post was written in Gruber's own Markdown mark-up scheme, by the way.
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