Re: Position of point in reply-with-original

[pmlists@free.fr (Peter Münster)]

Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:

>>>>>> Antoine Levitt <antoine.levitt@gmail.com>:
>
>> Why? Again, if the user sets the variable despite the warnings,
>> there's a good chance he knows what he's doing.
>
> Impossible.
>
> Nobody who would willingly pick top posting could possibly know what
> he's doing.

I agree: 90% of the top-posters never question what they are doing, they
just begin to write, where the MUA places the point. (5 lines of text,
500 lines of old messages attached, with headers and signatures...)

And the remaining 10% (people like Ted), do top-posting at work, because
they believe, that they need to conform to some "standard".

At my work, there are 99,9% top-posters, I'm the only one, who respects
the order in which people normally read text (from top to bottom). And
sometimes, people tell me, that my messages are more readable, and ask
me how I do it and how they could do it using Lotus Notes.

There are many other examples, where 90% of the people are doing the
"- arguably - wrong thing" (citing Adam):

- Typographic layout of a thesis
90% use the "standard" Word layout with very long lines on A4-paper
At my university institute, I was the only one using a professional
typesetting system with professional layout: a member of the jury said,
that it was for her like reading a book.

- Document format
99,9% of my colleagues use the "standard" proprietary Word-format to
save their documents (a lot of trouble, when sending to users with
different version of Word...). I use the ConTeXt typesetting system,
with version control, conditional compilation (one version for the
client, one for us), and so on..., and people keep asking me how I do
the things that I do...

Just 2 examples from my personal experience, but there are many others.

So question the "standard"!
Don't conform to the "standard" when you see, that's it's the "arguably
wrong thing"! ;)

-- 
           Peter