David Nebenzahl writes:
On 3/7/2010 1:03 PM Leon spake thus:

As is scrolling down through 30 ~ 35 lines of text if a 1-line or
one word reply is at the bottom and it could have easily been used
at the top.

But it puts the whole conversation *out of order*. As in bass-ackwards.

Larry's sig says it best:

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is it such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet?

Unfortunately, we've all been bamboozled into accepting top-posting as
the norm, because that's the way 99% of the corporate world does
things because, I suspect, that's the way Micro$oft products operate
out of the box, and nobody stops for a millisecond to think that there
might be a better way--and because people's attention spans seem to be
measured in milliseconds.

That's a good point. In fact, when corresponding in the "business"
(non-tech) world, I almost always top-post because I am convinced that
most of my colleagues and correspondants would not realize that there is
a new response beneath the quoted text; rather, most would probably
assume that I mistakenly hit reply before adding my own response and not
bother to scroll down to check. Sad but true...

That being said, I think top-posting sometimes is OK when you have a
short response or meta-content that addresses the entire thread and is
not so complicated that one needs to be intimately familiar with the
sequential development of the thread. In such cases, you may want to
still quote the bulk of the thread just in case for background context
but you want to save the reader the PITA of scrolling through it all
just to read your short, obvious, and context-independent response. Of
course, the pedantic and obsessive-compulsive may still not concede that
case...