Gregory Nowak <greg@???> writes:
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 07:26:50PM +0100, Edward Bartolo wrote:
>> I think, it is irritating to first having to scroll down text others
>> have written rather than the text the latest poster has written. If
>> the latest poster wants his readers to refer to ealier posts, he can
>> state that in his reply.
>
> I have to throw in my $0.01 here. First, like Edward, I too prefer top
> posting. I have noticed also that top posting seems to be an
> overwhelming convention on blindness-related lists.

[more of this]

It's the default behaviour of certain e-mail clients and was already (at
that time) directly opposed to established conventions for communicating
via e-mail. Had Microsoft chosen to split the replied-to text in half
and position the cursor in the middle of it by default, you'd now be
rationalizing that.

I've just accidentally read another of Edward's mails which seemed to be
reply to something I wrote but was actually a comment on something Aitor
wrote god-knows-where. This suggests that another 'default behaviour' is
"client can't do threading based on References" and since "it doesn't
make a difference", people just pick a random text for the list address.

There's a reason why people like to "rant and rave" about how useless/
overly time consuming e-mail conversation happens to be for them and
that's their 'default' refusal to format their messages sensibly. I
decidedly don't want to read all DNG mails of the last - how many days?
30 enough? - just to determine what Aitor wrote so that I understand
Edward's reply to that _without_ already knowing what the referenced
text was. I specifically gave up on trying to write something sensible
to the 'realloc' issue because locating the original message about that
without 'reading the entire threads of the last 16 years' was
impossible.