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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Chapter 6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="pt01.html" title="Part I. Introduction"/><link rel="previous" href="writing-style.html" title="Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style"/><link rel="next" href="speech-style.html" title="Chapter 7. Hacker Speech Style"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Chapter 6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="writing-style.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">Part I. Introduction</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="speech-style.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a id="email-style"/>Chapter 6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions</h2></div></div><div/></div><p>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.</p><p>Early mail and netnews readers had no facility for including messages
this way, so people had to paste in copy manually. BSD
<span class="citerefentry"><span class="refentrytitle">Mail</span>(1)</span> 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 <tt class="literal">&gt;</tt> or
<tt class="literal">&gt; </tt> became standard, perhaps owing to its use in
<span class="citerefentry"><span class="refentrytitle">ed</span>(1)</span> to display tabs (alternatively, it may derive from
the <tt class="literal">&gt;</tt> that some early Unix mailers used to quote lines
starting with &quot;From&quot; in text, so they wouldn't look like the beginnings of new
message headers). Inclusions within inclusions keep their
<tt class="literal">&gt;</tt> leaders, so the ‘nesting level' of a quotation
is visually apparent.</p><p>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,
“<span class="quote">No, that's wrong</span>” or “<span class="quote">I agree</span>” 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 “&gt; ” 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
<span class="emphasis"><em>entire</em></span> text of a preceding article,
<span class="emphasis"><em>followed</em></span> only by “<span class="quote">No, that's wrong</span>” or
“<span class="quote">I agree</span>”.</p><p>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 ‘&gt;' —
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.</p><p>Inclusion practice is still evolving, and disputes over the
‘correct’ inclusion style occasionally lead to
<a href="H/holy-wars.html"><i class="glossterm">holy wars</i></a>.</p><p>Most netters view an inclusion as a promise that comment on it will
immediately follow. The preferred, conversational style looks like
this,</p><div class="literallayout"><p><br/>
     &gt; relevant excerpt 1<br/>
     response to excerpt<br/>
     &gt; relevant excerpt 2<br/>
     response to excerpt<br/>
     &gt; relevant excerpt 3<br/>
     response to excerpt<br/>
</p></div><p>or for short messages like this:</p><div class="literallayout"><p><br/>
     &gt; entire message<br/>
     response to message<br/>
</p></div><p>Thanks to poor design of some PC-based mail agents (notably Microsoft
Outlook and Outlook Express), one will occasionally see the entire quoted
message <span class="emphasis"><em>after</em></span> the response, like this</p><div class="literallayout"><p><br/>
     response to message<br/>
     &gt; entire message<br/>
</p></div><p>but this practice is strongly deprecated.</p><p>Though <tt class="literal">&gt;</tt> remains the standard inclusion leader,
<tt class="literal">|</tt> is occasionally used for extended quotations where
original variations in indentation are being retained (one mailer even
combines these and uses <tt class="literal">|&gt;</tt>). 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 <tt class="literal">&gt; </tt> for
everyone, another (the most common) is <tt class="literal">&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;
</tt>, <tt class="literal">&gt; &gt; &gt; </tt>, etc. (or
<tt class="literal">&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt; </tt>, <tt class="literal">&gt;&gt;&gt;</tt>, 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 <tt class="literal">&gt; </tt>, <tt class="literal">: </tt>, <tt class="literal">|
</tt>, <tt class="literal">@</tt> (preserving nesting so that the inclusion
order of messages is still apparent, or tagging the inclusions with authors'
names). Yet <span class="emphasis"><em>another</em></span> style is to use each poster's
initials (or login name) as a citation leader for that poster.</p><p>Occasionally one sees a <tt class="literal"># </tt> 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).</p></div><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="writing-style.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="pt01.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="speech-style.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> Chapter 7. Hacker Speech Style</td></tr></table></div></body></html>