top posting (was: Hijack!)

On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 08:43:44AM -0800, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
> O.k. this might be a bit snooty but frankly it is almost 2008. If you
> are still a top poster, you obviously don't care about the people's
> content that you are replying to, to have enough wits to not top post.

There are those who argue persuasively that emailing is more like letter
writing than conversation, and that it is better to reply with one single
set of paragraphs than with a set of replies interspersed with quotes.
Moreover, under such circumstances, it is utterly silly to quote the entire
original argument first, because the reader then has to plough through a
long block of reproduced content to get to the novel stuff.

On a mailing list, perhaps one can argue that the conventions simply have to
be followed. But I know I find it pretty annoying to get 36 lines of quoted
text followed by something like, "No: see the manual, section x.y.z."

I don't think top posting is always the crime it's made to be (and I get a
little tired of lectures to others about it on these lists).

A