From: fburton@... (Francis Burton)
Date: 2008-05-28T19:05:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Top-posting

In article <483C763C.9070400@gmail.com>,
James Britt  <james.britt@gmail.com> wrote:
>I've tried that, got poor results, and now take a simple approach:  I 
>try to do as little work as possible, and if someone posts a message I 
>find hard to read or follow, I will stop reading and move on.

Same here, with some guidance from the display that appears at
the top of my newsreader window that includes a nice tree-like
display that gives clues about the course of the thread (e.g.
whether there are two people arguing, if one post gets a lot of
replies, etc.):

--(1)--(2)--(2)--(2)
--(2)+-(2)+-(2)--(2)--(2)--(2)
     |    \-(2)--[2]--[2]+-[2]
     |                   \-[2]+
     |
     \-(2)

() and [] indicate read and unread messages respectively, and
I can navigate around the thread with arrow keys. If it looks
like the subthread is going nowhere, pressing ',' skips it.

>If people top-post and still get the results they are seeking (help, 
>suggestions, whatever), I guess they have found a working strategy, so 
>why should they stop.

Having both top- and bottom-posting styles is like allowing
cars to drive on both sides of the road. Things can get muddled
very quickly!

>But if you are going to post anything at all, consider you audience and 
>make things easy for the reader.

That's just commonsense.

>It's sort of like how you should write code; easy of reading trumps ease 
>of writing.

Not everyone aspires to that ideal. However, they only have
themselves to blame if it comes back to bite them on the bum.

Francis