One area where conventions for on-line writing are still in
some flux is the marking of included material from earlier
messages -- what would be called `block quotations' in ordinary
English. From the usual typographic convention employed for these
(smaller font at an extra indent), there derived a practice of
included text being indented by one ASCII TAB (0001001)
character, which under Unix and many other environments gives the
appearance of an 8-space indent.
Early mail and netnews readers had no facility for including
messages this way, so people had to paste in copy manually. BSD
Mail(1) was the first message agent to support
inclusion, and early Usenetters emulated its style. But the TAB
character tended to push included text too far to the right
(especially in multiply nested inclusions), leading to ugly
wraparounds. After a brief period of confusion (during which an
inclusion leader consisting of three or four spaces became
established in EMACS and a few mailers), the use of leading
> or > became standard, perhaps
owing to its use in ed(1) to display tabs
(alternatively, it may derive from the > that
some early Unix mailers used to quote lines starting with "From"
in text, so they wouldn't look like the beginnings of new message
headers). Inclusions within inclusions keep their
> leaders, so the `nesting level' of a quotation
is visually apparent.
The practice of including text from the parent article when
posting a followup helped solve what had been a major nuisance on
Usenet: the fact that articles do not arrive at different sites
in the same order. Careless posters used to post articles that
would begin with, or even consist entirely of, "No, that's wrong"
or "I agree" or the like. It was hard to see who was responding
to what. Consequently, around 1984, new news-posting software
evolved a facility to automatically include the text of a
previous article, marked with "> " or whatever the poster
chose. The poster was expected to delete all but the relevant
lines. The result has been that, now, careless posters post
articles containing the entire text of a preceding
article, followed only by "No, that's wrong" or "I
agree".
Many people feel that this cure is worse than the original
disease, and there soon appeared newsreader software designed to
let the reader skip over included text if desired. Today, some
posting software rejects articles containing too high a
proportion of lines beginning with `>' -- but this too has led
to undesirable workarounds, such as the deliberate inclusion of
zero-content filler lines which aren't quoted and thus pull the
message below the rejection threshold.
Because the default mailers supplied with Unix and other
operating systems haven't evolved as quickly as human usage, the
older conventions using a leading TAB or three or four spaces are
still alive; however, >-inclusion is now clearly the prevalent
form in both netnews and mail.
Inclusion practice is still evolving, and disputes over the
`correct' inclusion style occasionally lead to holy wars.
Most netters view an inclusion as a promise that comment on it
will immediately follow. The preferred, conversational style
looks like this,
> relevant excerpt 1
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 2
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 3
response to excerpt
or for short messages like this:
> entire message
response to message
Thanks to poor design of some PC-based mail agents, one will
occasionally see the entire quoted message after the
response, like this
response to message
> entire message
but this practice is strongly deprecated.
Though > remains the standard inclusion
leader, | is occasionally used for extended
quotations where original variations in indentation are being
retained (one mailer even combines these and uses
|>). One also sees different styles of quoting a
number of authors in the same message: one (deprecated because it
loses information) uses a leader of > for
everyone, another (the most common) is
> > > > , > > >
, etc. (or >>>> ,
>>>, etc., depending on line length and
nesting depth) reflecting the original order of messages, and yet
another is to use a different citation leader for each author,
say > , : , | ,
} (preserving nesting so that the inclusion order
of messages is still apparent, or tagging the inclusions with
authors' names). Yet another style is to use each
poster's initials (or login name) as a citation leader for that
poster.
Occasionally one sees a # leader used for
quotations from authoritative sources such as standards
documents; the intended allusion is to the root prompt (the
special Unix command prompt issued when one is running as the
privileged super-user).
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