Representing time: big-endian vs little-endian?

Few people now remember the bitter debates over the storage order for multi-byte values in 8-bit memory architectures. There were advantages to putting the LSB first, and other advantages to the opposite. The gently mocking term "little-endian" compares the debate to a trivial political dispute in Gulliver's Travels over which end an egg should be eaten from. A Wikipedia author picks out the key point as follows:

"On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen ends with: "Swift's point is that the difference between breaking the egg at the little-end and breaking it at the big-end is trivial. Therefore, he suggests, that everyone does it in his own preferred way. We agree that the difference between sending eggs with the little- or the big-end first is trivial, but we insist that everyone must do it in the same way, to avoid anarchy. Since the difference is trivial we may choose either way, but a decision must be made."

In user interface design, we regularly find ourselves in this kind of situation. In the early days of the scroll bar, it was far from clear whether the text should move up when the scroll bar moves up, or the other way round (i.e. the window moves up, so the text moves down). The best solution to these simple choices is sometimes so far from obvious that it can take years to get it right - people are still discovering (and disconcerted by) the decision to reverse the scrollbar drag direction that is used by default on Macintosh trackpads.

As Cohen notes in the case of standards wars, it's sometimes more important to agree on the choice than it is to make the right one. Sadly for the prototype developer, the only person you have to agree with is yourself. So this afternoon, I made the sudden decision to reverse the way in which the Palimpsest layer stack is rendered. I know I spent some time agonising over this about 9 months ago, but have stuck to my decision ever since then.

The problem is - should the stack be rendered in conventional narrative time order (oldest layers appear at the top of the screen, with newer ones appearing lower down), or in geological order (oldest layers at the bottom, with newer ones higher up)? I've just changed to the second of these options, in part because writing the tutorial made me increasingly uncomfortable that I had to refer to the layer "under the current one" when that layer was clearly above the current one on the screen.

It was easier to reverse this than I had feared, although an amusing discovery along they way was the realisation that the mapping of keyboard arrows to layer traversal had always been counter-intuitive. The down arrow moved up the stack, and the up arrow moved down it. Perhaps this should have been a sign that I made the wrong decision 9 months ago. (Though an interesting observation, back to the days when I said I was combining the Photoshop History and Layer palettes, is that the History palette renders time going down the screen, while the Layer palette has time going up the screen (if you paste, a new layer is created above the previous one). I wonder whether Photoshop users are ever disconcerted by this?