Schinckel.net

I like John Gruber, who writes for Daring Fireball. He usually hits the mark, but recently he’s been really harking on about the iPhone. Since they aren’t likely to be available over here in Oz for sometime, I’m not that interested, just yet. His latest post, Daring Fireball: On Top reverts back to a less iPhone topic, Top Posting in email replies. I ‘grew up’ using text-only interfaces on the internet, so email and usenet were king (and queen). I used to be a bottom/middle posting advocate, but have stopped for one very good reason. People think you haven’t replied at all when you bottom post. They don’t read down when they see that there is no response at the top. It’s as simple as that. I really prefer bottom/middle posting, it makes it much easier to structure a decent response to someone, yet it had really fallen out of favour. Perhaps I’ll restart this ancient practice. Except that every email client available nowadays is configured to automatically top post. Oh well. It just occurred to me that IM is much more mid-posting-like. You respond immediately to an argument, and the threads are mixed. Email is dead anyway (any situation where you receive 100 times as much Spam as Ham has passed its usefulness).