[tlug] Top posting craziness

["Shannon Jacobs" <shannon.jacobs@??>]

I see that this religious topic has appeared again, and I must be in a
religious mood this morning to feel like touching it with the
proverbial 10-foot pole, but...

My own preference is for top posting in most cases. The primary reason
is simply that it allows me to form a coherent and well-structured
presentation of new ideas, while still leaving the previous material
available for convenient reference. Additional positive reasons are
that it makes it easier to find the new material, that it is more
accessible to blind people, and that it is favored by many people I
respect and who apparently reciprocally respect me enough to think
that I can remember the context of the conversation without forcing it
in front of me.

My main negative reason against inline posting (and therefore in favor
of top-posting) is that I think inline response is actually more
confrontational, which probably surprises you in light of the
religious hostility that the top-posting topic often seems to
engender. In fact, I do respond inline in those situations where the
point of my response is to focus on flaws in a previous comment. In my
work as a professional critic, I ofen go even deeper than that,
focusing on word-by-word and between-the-line responses (generally
using colors and popup memos, respectively). However, I think the best
example of confrontational use of inline responses is in the advocacy
flame wars where you often see 15 and 20 levels of deeply nested
comments, but where the original ideas have been completely lost and
obscured. In those contexts, you frequently see Sophistic strategies
such as deliberate attempts to distract from the real issues and to
create artificial out-of-context statements (which are typically used
for straw men or ad hominem arguments).