Which clients?

> Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top > quote.

Outlook already did this. At least with Outlook, the UI is broken, so people understand what you mean when you complain. Gmail being smart, people have a hard time grasping what you mean when you try to get them to quote "smart". And both approaches are wrong (IMNHO).

> Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the > whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I > hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I > personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading.

Why would you have to scroll when "[e]mail clients hide quotes by default" ?

Anyway, lets not continue this into a flame war about top/bottom/proper quoting -- but I'm genuinely confused about your points above (they seem to contradict each other?).

I really need to play a bit with sup -- I hear they did a lot of things right.

For what it's worth, I think threading with quoting/conversations is still an unsolved problem (and I'm not just talking corner-cases and presence/absence of word wrap etc -- just what is the best way to present a conversation that a) makes conversation flow easily, and with readily available (correct amounts) of context while it is active, and b) reads like a reasonable transcript/conversation without too much redundancy for someone seeing the thread after the conversation has started. So far I think manually quoted replies, with bottom posting is by far the best).

> who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore

Most people on high-quality discussion lists? I think this goes more towards a "what is email as a medium"-type thing. Sometimes a quick reply is fine -- but if you are writing more than a paragraph, it is probably worth the time to put some effort into it (ironically, actively counteracted by things like hn's simple text-input field -- unless you invoke a proper editor, for example using the "It's all text!"-firefox extension, or ctrl-i for external editor with vimperator).

I think it's more that people don't really compose emails anymore -- they don't invoke a proper editor (whatever that may be for the user in question -- but something that at least allows a minimum of easy copy/cut/paste -- I would say vim/emacs, some might want something a little more modern). But when you're given an augmented text-field (the so-called rich web editors) -- ofcourse you won't be writing much. It's a horrible writing/editing experience.