Re: [tlug] Top posting craziness

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@??>]

Godwin Stewart writes:

 > It's for lazy users. Lazy because they need previous correspondance
 > available for "convenient reference", and lazy because the whole
 > top-posting stupidity started through a well-known virus propagation
 > engine pretending to be an MUA

C'mon Godwin, surely you know better than that.  Top-posting, as
advocated by some well-meaning individuals, is simply a port to email
of the common business practice of scrawling a brief note on the cover
memo to indicate approval of or comments on the attached document.  It
has a long history, longer than the existence of Windows, let alone
the infestation of Outhouse on the desktop.  (Specifically, it was
already condemned by Emily Postnews in the Usenet Netiquette FAQ in
1980, when I first read it.)  Like most ports it has problems not
evident in the original. ;-)

Top-posting is a reasonable convention in the context of business
communications.  That is carries over to discussion fora when users
inured to such a convention invade the forum is unfortunate and to be
opposed, but not at all unnatural.