Capitol wrote:

The current standard of newsreader is Microsoft OE. This is a top
posting protocol.

Posting style isn't a protocol; OE merely puts the cursor at the top
when replying to a post. Ctrl-End will shift it to the bottom.

Bottom posted replies are a pain in the butt for quick
reading of the letters in a theme.

I fail to understand the logic of that statement. In NGs like this one
posts tend to be question and answer sessions so if you top post then
the answer appears before the question - have you ever seen a FAQ
written that way?

Many responses are in fact mid posted
where the topic is more complex. If you want to see the problems of mid and
bottom posting in a crap news reader, simply look up a complex thread in
Google and try to follow it. It is much easier to follow in top posted OE.


In my experience, when you use Google groups the matches are often in
the middle of a thread and, if they are top posted, then you have to
scroll down to read what it is a reply to.

If the news reader cannot cope with OE style
correspondence, then I regret to say, that it is a minority taste.

It isn't that the *newsreaders* can't *cope* with top posting, it's the
people who don't like it. It certainly isn't a minority taste; quite the
contrary in fact. In the majority of Usenet groups top posting is
frowned upon.

usenet pedants who are still Canute like, refusing to accept that the
present standard is Microsoft and top posting.

With respect Capitol, Microsoft is *not* the standard. The Internet is a
platform-independent. OS-independent, hardware-independent medium;
no-one owns it, the standards are defined by agreement, e.g. RFCs and
the W3C (of which MS is a member).

Asserting that OE is the standard for news is the same as those who
assert that Internet Explorer is the standard for the Web and code
webpages full of IE-specific code that doesn't display properly, or at
all, in other browsers. Now, if they are just their own personal
webpages, then they are free to do that, but if they are coding webpages
for commercial sites (by which I mean sites that are selling on-line)
then they stand to lose business for that company (as am example, Argos
has lost business from me because their site only worked in IE - it now
works in all browsers). They may (and do) argue that non-IE browsers
only account for 5% of web users (a figure that is doubtless wildly
inaccurate) but I bet you'll not find a bean counter in the world who
would shrug their shoulds at lost revenue and say, "it doesn't matter,
it's only 5%".

I have read, on more than one occassion, people with the view that MS is
the standard (for the web) make statements like, "stuff the W3C; MS sets
the standard", which shows an incredible ignorance of what the web and
the W3C is. MS is one of many companies and groups who ratify the
standards for the Web and IE, since v5, has supported these standards.