Oh how I hesitate to get involved in this discussion! I've had it in varying forms for the last twenty years. Nonetheless ... The primary reasons people adapt *either* a top posting or a bottom posting habit/policy rather than taking the trouble to do contextual posting are: o They are lazy. o They lack the software tools to do anything more sophisticated. Most mail tool software that purports to provide editing functionality (most does) fails to include functions that do useful editing, or else the users never bother to learn to use them. The type of email people send tends to betray one or both of the traits above. One would think that good citation routines that allow users to intersperse contextual comments would be a fundamental feature, but very few provide it. Many people never learn to use anything more than the mouse and backspace keys to edit. I know engineers with many years of experience who are limited in this way. (The exception being those who use vi in a terminal screen, which includes *most* engineers/programmers who have worked with Linux/Unix for more than a few months.) They simply will not learn even one more feature to make their work easier than they must to get done what they are doing at the moment, and so live for years without even knowing that there are simple keys they can press to open up blank lines, refill paragraphs, move the cursor all directions, set indentations, delete words/sentences/paragraphs, reorder sentences, yank and kill text, mark and save and kill and insert regions, run macros, check spelling, edit multiple files or the same file in multiple views between windows in the same frame or in different frames side by side, enable mode-specific enhancements, saving, copying, running external commands on a piece of text, searching for and optionally replacing text, editing multiple things at once (it's typical for me to have at least 75 buffers open at once, and 200 is not unheard of), jumping between jobs, and on and on and on and on and on. It's a pitiful sight to see intelligent, computer-savy people struggling along in that way. They could quadruple their productivity for life by taking a couple of hours to learn how to use the tools they have available. But many tools that are handed to people do not have that capability built in. Typical are the editing capabilities of Web browsers, so for instance when you're filling in forms on a Web page, you don't have much functionality at your disposal. It's just not there. (There's a little bit in Firefox/Mozilla, almost none in any other, including Explorer.) A good word processor has a lot of that functionality built in at some level. MS Word does, but few people ever learn how to do more than Ctrl-C (copy) and Ctrl-V (paste). They wouldn't know how to get their cursor back to the beginning of a paragraph or line without the mouse or arrow keys if their life depended on it. So should we be surprised when we receive email that consists of: Me too! > blah blah blah ... > one million more lines of quoted text End of rant. We now return you to your various means of making a living. -- Lynn David Newton MontaVista Software, Inc. 2141 E. Broadway Road, Suite 108 Tempe, AZ 85282 Phone: 480-517-5047 Email: lnewton@mvista.com --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss