As I sometimes post things on this news group as replies, I was just
wondering which is the correct way to reply (or do no-one care). Should a
reply go at the top of the original message or the bottom.
It's a matter of religion.
Many people, particularly Usenet old-timers, prefer "bottom posting",
where new text goes below quoted text. Actually, we generally prefer
interleaved posting with snipping: the author of the new message
quotes as much as is necessary to establish context (taking into
account the nature of Usenet, which delivers messages in no
particular order, so you don't know which of your readers will have
seen the message you're quoting), inserts his or her comment, quotes
the next relevant bit, inserts comment, and so forth.
Note that both aspects - quoting before replying and snipping - are
important. Snipping reduces message length (there are still many
Usenet participants on slow and/or expensive links) and makes messages
more convenient to read. It also highlights what portions of the
quoted message you're referring to.
This convention is sufficiently widespread that several newsreaders of
pre-AOL vintage had "skip quoted material" commands - you'd hit a key
and the reader would scroll to the first line that wasn't a quotation.
Common belief has it that Microsoft Outlook was responsible for
popularizing top posting as an alternative reply style. I believe
there was some debate on that question the last time this came up in
alt.folklore.computers, but certainly Outlook, and the Microsoft
newsgroups, contributed to the practice.
When Henry Spencer wrote "Son of 1036", a draft for a replacement for
RFC 1036 (the Netnews specification), he included a recommendation for
snipping. He didn't specifically endorse bottom-posting, but it's
implied in some of the other comments (eg support for "skip quoted
material" function).
Son of 1036 never did make it to RFC status. Recently, however,
Charles Lindsey (et al) have promulgated a new set of IETF drafts for
updating 1036, however, and one of them, the "Usenet Best Practice"
draft, is similar in many ways to Son of 1036.[1]
I would say that's sufficient to conclude that the people most
interested in Usenet style and convention - the ones who are actually
going to the trouble to write standards drafts - advocate snipping
quoted material and flagging what remains with the ">" character in
the left margin. And they appear to lean toward bottom posting;
while they don't attempt to explicitly require or recommend it, the
other quotation guidelines make more sense for bottom-posted
(possibly interleaved) style.
1.
http://www.ietf.org/ids.by.wg/usefor.html
--
Michael Wojcik
[email protected]
Unfortunately, as a software professional, tradition requires me to spend New
Years Eve drinking alone, playing video games and sobbing uncontrollably.
-- Peter Johnson
