Breaking my "no more commenting rule"... On Wed, 2006-19-07 at 09:39 +0800, Chong Yu Meng wrote: > Normally, I do not like to comment on matters of style and guidelines, > but I think your reply shows a kind of dangerous logic. I don't agree, though if that's how it came across, my apologies. > I think we need to be clear that there is a difference between actions > that help others, and actions that prevent others from getting hurt. > There is some overlap between the two, of course. But you are drawing a > link between the two by saying that top posting is equivalent to > assaulting a policeman or bathing with a plugged-in toaster! I chose the extreme examples to make my point - you know, to illustrate how ridiculous jdow's statement was. I was just trying to say that rules, almost always, have to be followed. If we don't we have problems. I mean, even simple rules, like saying "thank you" when someone holds a door open for you is important: if you don't you're soon labelled an ass, and rightly so! In this case (i.e. mailing lists), communicating can become more difficult than it has to be. > Actions that hurt others should be sanctioned, but I hardly think that > top-posting counts as hurtful in any way. There are literally legions of > office workers who use Microsoft Outlook, which does top-posting by > default, Yes. And like I said, everyone has the right to choose, and I can't/won't stop them from my choosing. Outlook is my pet peeve. The damn thing not only top posts by default, but it breaks threading left, right, and centre. It really makes it a pain in the ass for me to follow the conversation when the person top posts AND breaks the thread. The only good thing about Outlook is that all the thread breaking and top posting can give a decent indication of how many Windows users are on a mailing list. The xen-users and thinstation-general mailing lists are a good example of that. What a mess. Searching those mail list archives is quite difficult. > To use (abuse?) an analogy from jdow, regardless of what I think about > corsets, I would neither support forcing all women to wear them nor > outlawing them completely. Same here. I suppose I'm different in that I've openly stated "not top posting" is good for everybody, a rule that should be followed. Regards, Ranbir -- Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu Linux 2.6.17-1.2141_FC4 i686 GNU/Linux 09:34:19 up 1 day, 3:04, 2 users, load average: 0.35, 0.26, 0.15
