the first people on usenet were scientists and email was linear, not packaged like it
is now, further messages were THREADED like it is now so we KNOW what the topic of
the message is as we scroll thru. I know cause I was there at the start. we didnt
all have puters at home and it would sometimes take days before we got an answer to
an email so it was pretty easy to forget what the person was talking about.
everyone is using readers that THREAD messages, that is line up the posts with the OP
first and then replies as they come in, right?

the problem of bottom posting is the nesting sequence....................

last person to post name at top
next persons name
first persons name
first person message
next persons message
last persons message

..... a lot of the time the nesting is all screwed up with posting in between the
nests and often there is confusion about who said what
along with this is the fact that
1. people rarely snip ANYTHING so the previous messages go on well out of sight and
2. last persons comment is usually of the "me too" variety
..... all this makes me delete the entire post

contrast that with the utter simplicity and cleanness of top posting:

last person to post name at top
last persons message

next persons name
next persons message

first persons name
first person message

now if, for some reason, the reader DOESNT know what the topic is they can scroll
down to the next person they are responding to. OR, they can erase the next person
and respond to the first person.

so instead of:

Wolf Kirchmeir wrote:

golddog wrote:
[...]
Does anyone else find this thread confusing with replies all over the
place? Must be a better way.



That's why Usenet early on developed the convention of bottom posting,
and of showing the snips. Too many people here top-post, too many people
here snip carelessly, etc. Conventions are arbitrary, but that doesn't
make them pointless. Spalng's a knvnshn, tuu. (And the only reason you
can decipher that is that I'm using a few of the E. spelling conventions.

HTH

It is much more logical if it is:

Wolf Kirchmeir wrote:
That's why Usenet early on developed the convention of bottom posting,
and of showing the snips. Too many people here top-post, too many people
here snip carelessly, etc. Conventions are arbitrary, but that doesn't
make them pointless. Spalng's a knvnshn, tuu. (And the only reason you
can decipher that is that I'm using a few of the E. spelling conventions.
HTH

golddog wrote:
[...]
Does anyone else find this thread confusing with replies all over the
place? Must be a better way.


Ingrid


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