On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 14:36:04 +0100, "MoonMan"
wrote:

In , Alex Heney typed:
On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 12:13:37 +0100, "MoonMan"
wrote:

snip

Bottom posting is a pain! it is a remnant of using teletypes. Why
can't we move with the technology?


Because it is NOTHING to do with teletypes.

Bottom posting is the norm because that is the way we read.

the norm with email is to add your comment at the top, this is why OE
defaults to it. it makes life simpler because the text which you have
responded to is always immediatly below what you are typing. this is still
linear text with the most relevant information at the top and older less
relevant information after it, much more logical and much more usable.


With email, you are most commonly making very quick responses, and are
responding to the person who wrote the email specifically, rather than
to a group.

Both of those features mean that you should rarely need to read the
quoted text. When there is a need, it is just as hard to read it
properly with top posted email.

I also strongly suspect that you have cause and effect mixed up when
you say that is why OE does it that way. It is only relatively
recently (since Outlook and OE became the most common mail clients)
that I have come across it as the norm.

Do you not like HTML because it isn't "the way we read"?


I have never seen anything in HTML (other than some newsgroup
postings) which has not had all the paragraphs following in normal
reading order. So no, there is nothing about HTML which is "not the
way we read".

I don't actually think HTML has any place in usenet, but that is a
different issue. that is because it takes around three times as much
bandwidth, and many news clients (including mine) will not render it.
Which they shouldn't, if they are following the standards.


--
Alex Heney, Global Villager
Why can't women put the toilet seat back up?

To reply by email, my address is aDOTjDOTheneyATbtinternetDOTcom