Re: Internet Explorer JavaScript Weirdness

Prisoner at War wrote:
On Apr 12, 2:54 am, "Evertjan." <exjxw.hannivo...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[Please do not toppost on usenet]

What -- even of myself?!?! ;-)

Posting is posting. Whom you're quoting (if anyone) is moot.

Seriously...what's with the top-posting issue??

Top-posting presents information out-of-order. With Usenet, there's no guarantee that everyone's seen previous messages, so they may need to read relevant earlier information to set your priceless contribution in context. Interleaved posting has been a Usenet convention for more than a quarter of a century.

> How come no one tells bloggers to not top-post?

1. Bloggers are usually posting in a forum they own. Their forum, their rules.

2. Blog postings usually don't quote extensively. (And the ones I've seen use in-context, interleaved quoting when they do.)

3. Teaching a blogger netiquette is surely an even less rewarding task than teaching it to a Usenet poster.

(Yes I know usenet isn't a blog -- or,
rather, it's a gigantic public blog

Or, rather, it's not a blog in any way, shape, or form.

Usenet isn't a web application, so there goes the "b" prefix. There are web-to-Usenet gateways (most notably the benighted Google), but they're parasitic and wholly unnecessary to Usenet. These days, Usenet is mostly carried over NNTP, and back in the Good Old Days before spam and AOL and Eternal September it was mostly carried over UUCP point-to-point links. (And the s/n ratio was orders of magnitude higher, and when someone got Usenet access for the first time they were subscribed to news.newusers and given a copy of _Zen and the Art of the Internet_ or some other guide.)

Nor is Usenet a log, so the suffix doesn't apply either. Usenet is a convention for formatting and organizing messages, and a collection of messages thus formatted and organized and propagated through various transports to Usenet nodes. It's not a single forum, it doesn't live on a central server or coordinate messages through a gatekeeper, and it's administered by convention. It's about as unlike a log as a collection of messages could be.

-- but I really don't understand
the logic of this top-posting no-no.)

It's explained in the group's FAQ. Checking the FAQ before asking questions is good netiquette. But as you can see, we have a circular dependency here.

Of course, the Usenet convention for interleaved quotation is explained in about a million other places as well.

But in any case, you don't need to understand the reason for it. Usenet has been around for about three decades now. It has prevailing conventions, and each Usenet group has prevailing conventions as well. It's not unreasonable to ask that new posters observe the group, learn the conventions, and follow them.

--
Michael Wojcik

.

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