On Wed, 2010-12-08 at 07:46 -0800, Jerry Franz wrote:
On 12/08/2010 07:03 AM, Scott Robbins wrote:
Honestly, I had no one in mind. I remember in an effort to get a life outside tech, I joined a mailing list for something else. I hadn't realized how most people top post, don't trim, and still use aol.
It really is worth noting that the bottom-post convention used on many technical lists *is not* how most of the planet now does email or other electronic communications. The rage we see here over it is really just another technical 'religious war' by people who don't tolerate change well. In reality, it doesn't matter much for most things either way and far more harm is done by the howling over it than using either convention actually causes.
Ok, well then you call be religiously intolerant. I care; for what I sincerely believe to be very *practical* reasons. Top-Post messages are often quite confusing; they often respond to one point in a longer message - and you don't have any idea which one. And the don't encourage trimming which makes reading a message resulting from a thread really bad.
I use e-mail, especially archives, to research problems and issues - so readability matters.
Trust me [which of course you won't seeing as you already dismissed my point of view] but it *REALLY MATTERS* when going back and reading e-mail how the poster(s) managed the message's contents.