[tlug] Top posting craziness

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@??>]

Shannon Jacobs argues that top posting "allows me to form a coherent
and well-structured presentation of new ideas, while still leaving the
previous material available for convenient reference."  He adds a
number of well-worn sub-arguments, which I will deal with below.  I
format this reply to demonstrate where I think his arguments lead.

Unfortunately, email is the wrong medium for maintaining
referentiality; that is what issue trackers and mailing list archives
are designed for.  If you really want to include referenced messages
in email, then use of the message/rfc822 content type with content
dispostion set to "attachment" is appropriate.

In general, Shannon's arguments suffer from the illusion that email is
email is email, whether it is an announcement, a response in a
personal conversation, or a post to a thread of discussion in a public
forum.  The deprecation of top-posting only applies to the latter
(although people used to the practices of public fora may reasonably
ask you to conform in a private conversation, you may just as
reasonably refuse to change your custom).

One aspect of structure is that it is easier to find the new material.
It may be hard to find the *old* material in this post, because
although the ideas are old, the expression is new, and I have chosen
to avoid use of block quoting where not absolutely necesary.  But in
most interlinearly formatted posts by experienced posters on TLUG, I
find it hard to believe that finding new material is difficult; the
block quoting style makes it stand out quite prominently.  Presumably
then the problem occurs with an *untrimmed* reply containing one or
two interlinear comments in many lines of referenced text.  But that
is just as verboten as top-posting!

The claim that top-posting is more accessible to blind people is
silly.  Quite the reverse, unless the quoted material is clearly
marked as "for reference only as needed", eg by inclusion as an
attachment.  Alternatively, the marking could be by custom, but that
would require a near absolute prohibition of the interlinear style,
which Shannon admits to being necessary in critical analysis.

Of course we wish to demonstrate respect for our conversation
partners' memories, but that same respect can be equally well
demonstrated by trimming, to nothing if necessary (or to make a point,
as I am doing).  (In fact, if you include the whole preceding post,
surely that can be taken as a snide commentary on your partner's
memory.)  It is also the case that in a public forum like TLUG we do
not take attendance at the beginning of threads.  So while we do
respect other participants' capabilities, we must account for the fact
that the contents of their memories may be uninitialized!

To summarize, Shannon's position about the advantages of top-posting
in presentation of information makes substantial sense primarily in
fairly short small-group conversations.  Posts to public mailing lists
are not "email" in the same sociological sense.

Shannon also advocates that inline responses are relatively
controntational.  But surely confrontation is appropriate in a
*discussion forum*, for one thing.  For another, if the ideas are
confrontational, but you top-post, you are then taking advantage of
what cognitive linguists call a factive statement.  (The classic
example is Perry Mason's "And so, Mr. Glover, just when did you stop
illegally importing marijuana?")  That is, any presumptions required
by your statement become facts that must be contested in a reply.  But
by definition the quoted materal cannot reply, so its meaning is
deprecated.

This technique may be less confrontational, but only because it's
insidious.  Take this post as an example: I will leave analysis of the
various not-entirely-nice rhetorical techniques I've used to the
reader, because I *do* wish to advocate well-trimmed interlinear
replies.  But I must point out that this post is going to be extremely
difficult for Shannon to rebut, not so much because there's no room
for rebuttal, but because he's going to have to reconstruct his
argument from what I've munged it into.

Shannon goes on to give an example:

 > However, I think the best example of confrontational use of inline
 > responses is in the advocacy flame wars where you often see 15 and
 > 20 levels of deeply nested comments, but where the original ideas
 > have been completely lost and obscured. In those contexts, you
 > frequently see Sophistic strategies such as deliberate attempts to
 > distract from the real issues and to create artificial
 > out-of-context statements (which are typically used for straw men
 > or ad hominem arguments).

I don't think any top-posting opponents claim that such abuse is a
good thing.  But suppose we remove the advocacy and connotation-laden
wording from that statement:

  An example of use of inline responses is in threads where you see as
  many as 15 and 20 levels of deeply nested comments, but where the
  original ideas have been completely lost and obscured.

Now, I don't get it!  Would someone please explain how in a context
where deep nesting is appropriate, top-posting would help prevent loss
or obscuring of original ideas in the context of 15-20 levels of
nested ideas?  Or, alternatively, how top-posting would prevent such
nesting in contexts where it is inappropriate, without inhibiting
nesting where it is useful?