D. Spencer Hines wrote:

No...

You miss the point.

You missed the point.

The old material is down there for perusal by those who have not been
following the thread or who have poor memories -- OR who want to refresh
their memories -- OR who want to focus on a particular statement.

Then don't bother quoting the other posts. If you are going to force
the user to go hunting for the context of your reply, you might as well
as force them to go read the post to which you replied.

NO need to put all that baggage up front.

And there's no point in putting all that baggage at the end, either, if
you aren't going to provide context for your reply.

There is simply NO reason to force the alert, witting, intelligent reader to
slog through it all again.

Not everyone visits just one or two newsgroups as do you. Not everyone
merely reads those posts of interests. Not everyone only responds to
only one or two posts per day. Providing context means letting someone
regain the context of something that they aren't going to waste brain
cells to remember.

Microsoft had it right initially...

Since Microsoft did not invent Usenet and since Microsoft doesn't define
the RFCs for Usenet and since Microsoft was so very late an entrant to
Usenet that de facto standards already existed that Microsoft *chose* to
ignore does not make Microsoft right. It just made the spell checking
and prepend code easier to implement.

But CHOICE of Top or Bottom Posting for the dullards and taking it to the UI
rather than through Registry Changes was a reasonable action.

To that I will agree but then YOU must also realize that Microsoft would
have added the registry edits or UI config settings to select which
posting style to use unless Microsoft finally realized that they were
not correct and that they had failed in trying to rewrite the de facto
standards in long practice before Microsoft showed up in Usenet. They
got it wrong and then offered a choice of doing it the old way or doing
it their way.