Netiquette - posting styles/ guidelines

Styles:
1. Top-posting
2. Bottom-posting
3. Inline-replying
4. Double-qouting

Top-posting:
Writing the message above the original text, when one replies to an email or a post in a newsgroup.

No problems.  6pm it is then.
Jim
At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:
> Whoa!  Hold on.  I have job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out
> a report to key tech staff.  Can you not push it back an hour?
> Danny
>
> At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote:
> > I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
> > minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates
> > and important fixes.
> > Jim 

This style of posting resembles forwarding messages with new text appended at the top:

Hello A.B. !

Here is the relevant portion of the letter that X.Z.
sent to our group, as requested.

Yours,
N.N.

On Wednesday, X.Y. wrote:
> Hi, team!
>
> Please work on portions 5 and 9 for Friday.  The customer says
> the rest isn't critical, as they mention below.
>
> Thanks,
> X.Z.
>
> On Monday, Customer wrote:
> > Dear Sir,
> >
> > We will need to have the new doohicky method implemented, as well
> > as the heffalump output.  We really need this by Friday, and if
> > your team needs to shift focus to achieve those two deliverables,
> > we can wait until afterward for the remainder of the work.
> >
> > Thank you,
> > J. Customer 

In short,it looks somewhat like this:

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Bottom-posting:
The opposite of top-posting. Now the new message is placed below the original text.The reply is placed below the quote to preserve the logical order of the replies and follow the Western reading direction from top to bottom.

This is typically done when only a single portion of the previous message is being replied to; the rest of the quoted material is trimmed.

> At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote:
> > I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
> > minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates
> > and important fixes.

At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:
> Whoa! Hold on. I have job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out
> a report to key tech staff. Can you not push it back an hour?No problems. 6pm it is then.

Scrolling down through a post to find a reply is inconvenient, especially for short replies to long messages, and many inexperienced computer users may not know that they need to scroll down to find a reply to their query. When sending an untrimmed bottom posted message, one might indicate inline replies with a notice at the top such as "I have replied below." However, as many modern mail programs are capable of displaying different levels of quotation with different colors (as seen here), this is not so much of an issue any more.


Inline replying:
Inline replies keep related sections of a discussion together within a message. As such it is easier to fork off parallel 'threads' of discussion from a single source message, each perhaps dealing with only one specific point (or subset of points) from the original.

On Thursday, Jim wrote:
> When considering the variation in style between the original
> novel and the movie adaptation, it is clear to see that
[snipped...]

Yes, but almost twenty years separates the book and the film.


> The movie clearly adds a sense of menace to the story which
> is not present in the original book.  This is unacceptable
[Darker interpretation pros and cons, trimmed...]

I agree.  The darker tone works well, once one understands the two are aimed at different audiences.

Double-qouting:
Another style involves replying in an interleaved manner to selected quotes from the original message, as described above, but then following this with a fullquote of the entire message, as if top-posting. This preserves the thread text in a single message, and also allows seeing what's being replied to in context. However this also results in some portions of the original message being quoted twice, which takes up extra space and might be considered confusing.

> Can you present your report an hour later?
Yes I can.  The report will now happen at 3pm, and the summary will be sent no later than 5pm.
Jim


At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:
> > 2.00pm: Present report
> Jim, I have a meeting at that time. Can you present your report an hour later?
>
> > 4.30pm: Send out summary of feedback
> Also if you do the above, this may need to happen later too.
> Danny
>
>
> At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote:
> > My schedule for today will be:
> > 10.00am: Gather data for report
> > 2.00pm: Present report to team
> > 4.30pm: Send out summary of feedback
> > Jim 

Reference: Wikipedia
Courtesy: Ringo for his mail