Web-standards advocate, Molly Holzchlag (molly.com) proposes, in a recent post, abolishing “bottom-posting.” I was disappointed to read that headline, until I realized she was not referring to blog posts about our bottom. In my case, I’ve been constipated for three days and I’ve consumed 3 bowls of cereal in the past 20 minutes hoping Mother Nature shall work her magic tomorrow morning.
Indeed, Molly may or may not be okay with us posting about our bottom or bowl movements (how about the chunks of undigested corn or the colors that result from flavored water-ice, Slurpies, Icees or snowballs?
No. Molly is talking about the style conventions for e-mails or forums, where new comments appear on the bottom.
- First, she says, we’re becoming extremely used to backward sequencing. Blogs do this automatically. Twitter does too. Second we have many tools now so as to retrieve and save threads. IMAP, for one. Gmail provides archives. All current, popular mail clients allow some sort of filtering and thread views.
- Third, bottom-posting needs to die a fast death (because of the) increasing access of email on small devices. It becomes absolutely senseless to have an entire novel sent when the message is simply “yup, I’m on the task” or what have you.
- The final reason that bottom-posting sucks is that long emails that require a user to scroll through what is sometimes pages and pages of information is physically damaging and actually very difficult to do for those of us whose wrists and fingers tire easily.
No word yet on how Molly feels about the whole toilet-paper “under” or “over” debate.
Under, not over.
over not under
Stick a match up your ass.
Who does this Molly person think she is? For email bottom posting is probably not the best, but for blogs like this I hate reverse chronological posting.
That big-assed woman in the picture was on the train with me!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3bjVsfnPMk (start at 1:40)
Under? Seriously?
Over is clearly better.
Over is the only way to go.
I can understand the sequencing issue, when I use twitter I can see what has just happened, very good when following a trend topic.
Forums, I’m not a big forum user, I use IMDB.com and that has posts about a topic,( like whether an actor is good or not, or a film is awful etc,) which have the opening post then the replies/responses, with order from the first post to the last post time wise. for this particular scenario this is really the best way, as the whole post is then a discussion, where people sometimes refer back to the opening post.
I think this bottom posting needs to be looked at more closely, as in IMDB then reading the last post first could be confusing. I’m sure that there are similar sites where bottom posting are needed for understanding.
Actually, this post should be at the top of the page.
My bum is on the post
my bum is on the post
look at me
my bum is on the post
here’s how it works:
Those who like big government put it under.
Those who are independent creative thinkers put it over.
It’s been scientifically tested and it says so in the bible
woah, Nalts! How did you get a picture of my 5th grade teacher on this post??
An unrelated, but nevertheless enriching clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZsBL4d1Eus
^That looked painful!
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Hello how do you guys plan to start the new year?