"Ann in Houston" wrote:

Why is top posting worse than egregious spelling?

Net etiquette discourages top posting because it makes reading in
context much more difficult.

Correct net etiquette is to overlook spelling mistakes, in fact it
encourages spelling shortcuts, IMHO. Perfect spelling is not necessary
in news groups since most postings are conversational in nature and it
is more important to share ideas then to share correct spelling. I must
admit that I stop reading some posting since the misspellings make
reading a chore, and that is not what I am here for. I try to read what
I write before posting and usually run spell checker.

By the way, net etiquette dates back to the ARPANET days (the '70s and
'80s), well before the internet as we know it. Most of the people on
ARPANET were well educated but not English majors by any stretch of the
imagination. To many, English was a second language or third language.