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Re: Fisking vs Top-Posting

2010-09-21 06:55:13
On 21 Sep 2010, at 09:44, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
On Sep 20, 2010, at 7:20 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
One of the problems I have seen emerge on many IETF mailing lists is the 
habit of fisking.

Please clarify what you mean by fisking.

By fisking I mean responding to a post  line by line *while reading it for 
the first time*.

Thanks.  And why is this a bad thing, in your view?

[Snip the rest of this brilliant and audacious take.]
You, sir, are owed a beer.  And I am owed a new keyboard, because the coffee I 
was drinking is suddenly and mysteriously absent from both my cup and my 
stomach ...

In all seriousness, forcing any particular approach is the real issue.  I 
can't imagine how it would be accomplished.  What I'd really like to force 
people to do is be more thoughtful and restrained; if they did that, it 
wouldn't much matter what approach they took to replies.  -- Nathaniel

+1.  I do generally prefer an in-line style, and that because I wish to give 
full attention to the post and leave no chance of ambiguity - but I accept the 
utility of top-posting, on very, very rare occasions.  In particular, 
high-volume blindness-only lists tend to prefer top-posting heavily because the 
readers can get quickly to the answers using linear top-down reading by speech 
synthesis.  (No doubt it is not a coincidence that I am on very few such lists.)

PS for the humor impaired -- only my last paragraph was intended to be 
serious.  -- 

Oh, and now you've gone and ruined it. :-)

Cheers,
Sabahattin
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