top posting is better

[Lynn David Newton]

Oh how I hesitate to get involved in this discussion!
I've had it in varying forms for the last twenty years.
Nonetheless ...

The primary reasons people adapt *either* a top posting
or a bottom posting habit/policy rather than taking the
trouble to do contextual posting are:

o They are lazy.
o They lack the software tools to do anything more
  sophisticated.

Most mail tool software that purports to provide
editing functionality (most does) fails to include
functions that do useful editing, or else the users
never bother to learn to use them. The type of email
people send tends to betray one or both of the traits
above.

One would think that good citation routines that allow
users to intersperse contextual comments would be a
fundamental feature, but very few provide it.

Many people never learn to use anything more than the
mouse and backspace keys to edit. I know engineers with
many years of experience who are limited in this way. 
(The exception being those who use vi in a terminal
screen, which includes *most* engineers/programmers who
have worked with Linux/Unix for more than a few
months.) They simply will not learn even one more
feature to make their work easier than they must to get
done what they are doing at the moment, and so live for
years without even knowing that there are simple keys
they can press to open up blank lines, refill
paragraphs, move the cursor all directions, set
indentations, delete words/sentences/paragraphs,
reorder sentences, yank and kill text, mark and save
and kill and insert regions, run macros, check
spelling, edit multiple files or the same file in
multiple views between windows in the same frame or in
different frames side by side, enable mode-specific
enhancements, saving, copying, running external
commands on a piece of text, searching for and
optionally replacing text, editing multiple things at
once (it's typical for me to have at least 75 buffers
open at once, and 200 is not unheard of), jumping
between jobs, and on and on and on and on and on. It's
a pitiful sight to see intelligent, computer-savy
people struggling along in that way. They could
quadruple their productivity for life by taking a
couple of hours to learn how to use the tools they have
available.

But many tools that are handed to people do not have
that capability built in. Typical are the editing
capabilities of Web browsers, so for instance when
you're filling in forms on a Web page, you don't have
much functionality at your disposal. It's just not
there. (There's a little bit in Firefox/Mozilla, almost
none in any other, including Explorer.)

A good word processor has a lot of that functionality
built in at some level. MS Word does, but few people
ever learn how to do more than Ctrl-C (copy) and Ctrl-V
(paste). They wouldn't know how to get their cursor
back to the beginning of a paragraph or line without
the mouse or arrow keys if their life depended on it.

So should we be surprised when we receive email that
consists of:

Me too!

> blah blah blah ...
> one million more lines of quoted text

End of rant. We now return you to your various means of
making a living.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
MontaVista Software, Inc.
2141 E. Broadway Road, Suite 108
Tempe, AZ 85282
Phone: 480-517-5047
Email: lnewton at mvista.com