WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: WebAIM List Update, Etiquette, and Contest

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Apr 17, 2012 1:25PM

Lucy-

If you are responding to a message, the best solution is to simply
clear out the entirety of the message you are responding to before
adding your response, as I have done in this message. This is
accessible to everyone. However, if you are responding to only a
portion of a previous message, posting your response to the bottom is
by far the best way to make it clear to everyone what you are actually
responding to. If the quoted message is trimmed and kept to only the
relevant text you are responding to, this is easily accessible and
understandable.

If you do not like bottom posting, this is fine, but please do not top
post as you did in your message. This simply regurgitates the previous
messages over and over again in the archives and the list digest,
making them very difficult and inaccessible to everyone.

As an example, check out this recent message from the archives -
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message?id 075 It is a 2 sentence,
top-posted response that then quotes 28 previous messages - over 350
lines and 13,000 characters of unnecessarily repeated content. If you
try to read the entire thread -
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?threadR59 - it's over 4000
lines and 210,000 characters of repeated content. This, by the way, is
exactly what list digest readers have to sort through. If properly
trimmed, the thread would have been a few hundred lines of easily
consumable and accessible content.

Jared