In Praise of Top-Posting

• Threads are structured according to relevance.

Top-posting effectively provides a drill-down structure with the most recent messages at the top. If you don't care about the context, the latest info is right there in front of you. If you do want to see the history, the scrolling effort is proportional to how far back you want to go.

• Messages remain coherent instead of being scattered throughout a thread.

There are many instances where the exact content of someone's message needs to be referred to, complete with header. How do you do this if the message is inline-scattered?

I'm not aware of any commonly used messaging system that manages individual points and replies within a message. And why would it? The elements of a thread are individual characters grouped into messages. Any intermediate groupings would be totally arbitrary.

• Weak-brained people who can't mentally flip mirror images or visualise the fourth dimension are screwed.

Reverse-order contributions seem to throw some people, particularly Usenet old-timers. We need less of these people contributing to threads anyway :)