Toby wrote:
"ASAAR" wrote in message

Another reason why it mattered in the old days was because people
could read text much faster than it was delivered by slow modems.
Being able to quickly scroll past reams of text was not possible,
and if you watched the screen as many replies were retrieved, you
were quite aware that a lot of time was wasted reading and
re-reading the same text posted by those too clueless or too lazy to
trim the irrelevant text.

OTOH I presently scroll past reams of text, vainly looking for replies, only
to find a three-word response buried a number of pages down. This is more
than annoying. In a perfect world text would be trimmed appropriately, but
given that that is never going to happen, I think that at times top posting
can be justified for speed and visibility, although I know that is not a
popular view here.

But things evolve according to the exigencies of the time, and just as we
are now dropping the 'm' from the objective case of 'who' and saying,
'that's the place I went' without collective gasps of horror, I think you
are fighting a rearguard action against top posting.

Thanks, Toby for a reasoned and polite response; all too rare in 2008.

Yes, trimming is really the thing, and I try to do so in every post,
esp. if I'm contributing such gems as "Me, too!" or "OMG I am so LOL".

I try to think that if I spend one second deleting pages of garbage,
it'll save hundreds some fraction of a second in non-scrolling. Same
with watching where replies are going, but here some are just ignorant
of where they go; others don't care, and still others do so to be annoying.

There's also an add-on or two for OE, so that sig lines are auto-trimmed
if properly formatted, the old dash dash space return.

--
John McWilliams