[ale] OT: top-posting

[Solomon Peachy]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 01:55:01PM -0500, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> I think in the business world top-posting is customary and in
> the engineering world bottom-posting is customary.  Maybe
> because engineers have a tendency to analyze things and emails
> can become long threads.

There's a simpler reason than that -- top-posting lets you preserve the 
original message, and indeed the whole thread, in its entirety.  The 
message contains all of the original context.  This way you can forward 
a single message and the recipient will get everything that was sent up 
to that point.

Basically, it's a way to work around crummy tools.

More techncically-astute folks know the value of good tools, and use 
them to make their lives earlier -- your mail client can track/thread 
messages and repies so you don't need to, and has sane searching 
features -- plus, bottom/middle-posting lets you reply to specific 
points more clearly.  

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy        		       pizza at shaftnet dot org	 
Melbourne, FL                          ^^ (mail/jabber/gtalk) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
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