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OT Annoying Habits (Was: when format strings attack)

Gabriel Genellina gagsl-py at yahoo.com.ar
Fri Jan 19 20:15:22 EST 2007 
At Friday 19/1/2007 18:43, Carroll, Barry wrote:

>Secondly, can someone point me to the Standard Usenet Convention that
>mandates against top-posting.  This is not sarcasm; I would really like
>to see it.

There are some guidelines, like RFC 1855 (not a real standard, or 
enforced in any way):
http://www.faqs.org/ftp/rfc/rfc1855.txt
"If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
       summarize the original AT THE TOP OF THE MESSAGE, or include just
       enough text of the original to give a context (...) But do not 
include the entire original!" (capitals added by me).

>You see, I recently returned to Usenet after a LONG absence.
>When I was last a regular Usenet citizen the Internet was new, GUI
>interfaces were experimental and the World Wide Web didn't exist yet.
>Newsreader software was text-based.  Top-posting was the common
>practice, because it was the most convenient: you didn't have to page
>through an arbitrarily large number of messages, most of which you'd
>already read umpteen times, to get to the new stuff you were interested
>in.

Really? Top posting a common practice? I'm not a youngster either and 
I've never seen top posting as a *norm* but an exception.
Old newsreaders had a new/quoted ratio, and enforced it to be rather 
high - so it was not easy to forget to trim the quoted text.
http://www.i-hate-computers.demon.co.uk/quote.html
Digging a bit one can find some old recommendations, like the Big 
Dummy's Guide to the Internet (1993):
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/bdgtti/bdgtti_2.html
Or people puzzled on how this works:
http://groups.google.com/group/news.newusers.questions/browse_thread/thread/a75b1f4cfe470276/b38f62fc633db61e


-- 
Gabriel Genellina
Softlab SRL 


	

	
		
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