Stop top posting, please.

[Don Erickson]

On Sat, 24 May 2003, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> So basically, if you were in church and someone explained that it was 
> considered rude to wear a hat indoors, you would leave your backwards ball cap 
> on and tell them to go fsck themselves, right?

Huh??  Wait, which side am I on?  I was arguing AGAINST top-posting and
html.  Hmmm, I obviously wasn't very clear about that.  Here's what you
said I said, in response to what Hal said:

> Quoting Don Erickson <derick at shark.zeni.net>:
> 
> > Absolutely.  The real problem is, these jerks that expect everyone to
> > follow these archaic conventions obviously have ZERO imagination, or
> > they'd be able to adapt.

This was supposed to be satire.  I AM one of the jerks arguing for the
archaic conventions.  Hal's reverse back-posting example flaunting 
accepted communication conventions, I felt negated the notion that the
anal old-bies were too calcified in their thinking to keep up with the
new, fast, slick, flash-capable mail client output.

My point, then and now, is that there IS a good reason for the accepted
rules, and that reason is clarity.    

Obviously I went too far afield if I was misunderstood 180 degrees.

But, as to the citations of poor posting practices by large numbers of
people, this does not magically transform this behavior into good
behavior.  It simply is a large sampling of poor behavior.

Regards,

-Don