Essjay001 wrote:

parish wrote:
Your point being?

My point being that every office I have worked always place the latest
correspondence on the top not just the government ones


That of course is usually because the company has "standardized" on OE
simply because it is bundled with Winodws (or Outlook 'coz it's bundled
with Office) and that's what OE does by default and a company can impose
whatever rules/standards it choses.

Of course it is important to distinguish between e-mail and Usenet. The
former is usually an exchange between two people (or maybe a handful of
people) but Usenet is a public forum read and contributed to by
hundreds/thousands/millions of people and grow into long convoluted
threads with sub-threads (like this one ;-) ).

If you and I were communicating by e-mail I wouldn't complain about you
top-posting (but I'd bottom-post *my* replies) however in this (or any
other) newsgroup then bottom posting is the well established convention;
the fact that it is a 30-year old convention (and thus pre-dates
Windows) is irrelevant.

Outlook, OE, Netscape/Mozilla are primarily e-mail clients that also
handle news (because there are similarities between the two). NS/Moz
bottom-posts by default but has an option to use top posting instead,
which was implemented because people were having problems getting NS/Moz
accept *at work* because the convention there was top posting.

Whether you, or I, or anyone, likes it or not, bottom-posting is the
accepted convention on Usenet (with the possible exception of the
microsoft.public hierarchy) and people who top post will be frowned upon
(although they will, initially at least, be asked *politely* to desist).

All the above applies equally to posting in HTML on Usenet.

Regards,

Parish