Phil Boswell wrote:
"Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com wrote in message news:f3fedb0d05091119023d54b0e3@mail.gmail.com... On 12/09/05, Daniel P. B. Smith dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
What I object to is the frequent _flaming_ of people for top-posting, and to the inaccurate claim that top-posting is considered a major, important faux pas in all Internet discussions at all times.
[Random factoid: first usenet citations I can find are just on eight years ago. Which surprises me; I'm sure I remember it around when I turned up. OTOH, they reference a pre-existing culture - "You can get in a lot of trouble in the Netscape newsgroups for 'Top Posting'." - so meh.)
Off the top of my head, ISTR this was not unconnected with the fact that by default, most Microsoft products implement the "Reply" function in such a way as to encourage top-posting. It was often immediately obvious that a user was using a vanilla Microsoft product without having taken the slightest effort to research the proper netiquette, and was as much of a red flag to certain types of user as an AOL address. Many newbies were bitten in those days :-)
IOW this anti-top-posting was in some ways as much "anti-Microsoft" as anything else. The fact that you are referencing Netscape groups as a source of early information suggests that my memory for this might not be as faulty as I feared :-)
Google is the new Microsoft... Hotmail is the new AOL...
Further posts on this topic to flamewars-l@wikimedia.org, please ;)