Why top-posting is bad

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:32 PM +0200 2004-08-29, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:

>>  	Lines re-wrapped, I should think.  Or, if he's responding to
>>  e-mail that was formatted in HTML, then it's probably the first ASCII
>>  conversion/line-wrapping job that has been done to them.
>
>  None of the above.  As you'd have known if you saw my mail (it's in the
>  archives).

	I did see the message in question.

	However, I know that my own MUA does line re-wrapping and HTML 
formatting, so it's hard for me to be sure that I'm seeing exactly 
the same thing that Greg does with his MUA.  Therefore, it's hard for 
me to know for certain what Greg might be thinking when he sees the 
same message on his end.  I can say that I've known Greg for a while, 
and over the years I have never known him to make a mistake of this 
sort on messages that he is replying to.

	In this case, I came to what I believed to be highly likely 
conclusions based on the history I've seen from him and the messages 
that he has responded to in the past, and then extrapolated from that 
as to what I felt he was probably complaining about in your specific 
case.


	I will concede that I was not correct in the conclusions I came 
to.  However, I believe that the overall process was reasonably 
sound, albeit not completely perfect.

	That said, I don't think I made any absolute statements as to 
what Greg was definitely thinking at the time or what he was 
precisely complaining about.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.