On Thu, 05 Apr 2007 14:18:37 -0700, Lee McGee wrote:

Making a post small is not rocket science.

This is true, but orthogonal to the idea of top/bottom posting.

People don't normally repeat parts of a conversation, but conversations
are normally far quicker than USENET dialog. Thus, reminders can help.

More, dialogs in person are far more interactive than on USENET. A speaks
a little, B speaks a little, etc. Because of the latency of USENET, that
doesn't work as well here. So A "speaks" (writes) a bunch, and then B
replies. Often, a given reply message actually consists of multiple
replies to multiple points made by A.

It makes sense in that case to interleave cited text with response.
Answers typically follow questions (certain TV shows excepted {8^),
so the response to a cited bit of text follows the cited bit of text.

Thus, bottom-posting.

The message with a lone citation is just a degenerate case, and shouldn't
be treated differently.

The utility of this becomes even more apparent as A (or C) replies to
B. Nested citations (trimmed as much as possible, of course) help to
retain the context for readers (esp. given that USENET is neither reliable
nor ordered), but it requires far more work to understand if the response
precedes the cited text.

- Andrew