Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions

Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions
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One area where hackish 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 the notation 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.

In 1991 practice is still evolving, and disputes over the `correct'
inclusion style occasionally lead to {holy wars}.  One variant
style reported uses the citation character `|' in place of `>' for
extended quotations where original variations in indentation are being
retained.  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).