Re: Internet Explorer JavaScript Weirdness

On Apr 15, 10:39 am, Michael Wojcik <mwoj...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


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




Top-posting presents information out-of-order.

Yeah, but so do blogs and e-mail.

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.



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.

LOL! And I'd thought usenet was the pits! =)

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

I see "blog," "usenet," "texting," and "world wide web" as instances
of "informal conversation"...I just don't see the point of MLA/Boswell-
style rules of publication/debate in this medium...I can't believe I'm
the only one who thinks this way....

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.)

Well, usenet was started up by academics, I guess, so no surprise that
it was so insistent on MLA rules of publication and all that
jazz...but come on, this isn't a scientific journal we're creating;
it's just passing notes....

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.

And any analogy will tear if stretched far enough, because analogies
are meant to compare similar qualities of different things -- and not
meant to say that one thing is "identical" (in the mathematical sense)
with another thing.

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.

I'm sorry, but with all due respect, I cannot follow rules I don't
believe in (I'm just that kind of person). It seems more visually
pleasing to place the one or two paragraphs of a response on top of
the post quoted than to bury it underneath that post if the post is
rather much longer.

To me, it's not like you or someone else suddenly can't parse my words
or your computer shuts down or something if I had top-posted. I
really don't see the "harm" of top-posting, whereas I see benefits at
times. To me, it's like the toilet paper roll "controversy" -- under
or over, it's the same! =)

--
Michael Wojcik

.

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