Re: [not-so-offlist] posting style [was Re: Using .XCompose]
On Wed, 8 Jul 2020 Ajith R wrote:
Hi David,
Debian conformant style looks like this instead:
Do I understand the style correctly now?
LOL. Probably not. Maybe I should have allowed your discovery of the
mailing list's quoting conventions to take its natural course.
It was maybe silly of me to explain it, before we've figured out why
some of your seemingly reasonable XCompose lines, like this one
<U0D19> : "ങ്ങ" # Ajith's auto-geminate rule
aren't effective.
BTW, a query about how the original message is quoted with '<'.
That left angle bracket '<' points in the wrong direction.
A conventional quoted-line prefix is
"> "
which is a right angle bracket followed by a space.
A mail client that understands this convention may interpret these
indicators, and display any text so prefixed in some other distinctive
fashion. The prefix is mere markup that means "The following text on
this line is quoted material".
And so what one sees displayed in a mail client may not exactly
correspond to the plain text of the message body. Instead of literal
angle bracket prefixes, you might see some other visual representation
of the embedding.
Examining message bodies in a text editor (or with a pager like
"less") might help reduce confusion.
Is it done by hand or does any email clients do it automatically?
Only the artisanal hand-quoter would be able to tell the difference!
And I'm sure there exists at least one maverick mail client that does
not do so automatically.
But I have not taken a survey of email clients. Mine (alpine) does do
so automatically whenever I include a message body in my reply to that
message. And even if it did not automatically prefix the lines of the
quoted message body, then it would not be difficult to tell any
decently functional text editor to employ
"> "
as a comment string, and then select and comment blocks of quoted
text.
And these prefixes will stack, over the course of a thread. Naturally
enough, email lends itself to replies. So you have an initial message
(degree zero), replies to such a message (degree one), and replies to
replies (degree two), and so on.
A message of the Nth degree might retain lines of quoted material from
N previous messages. And if it does, then one expects to find each of
those lines constituting the most deeply embedded material prefixed
with N instances of
"> "
Is it necessary that each line s marked with '<'?
All the cool people prefix each line of a quoted message body with
"> "
It is cool to be cool, but not strictly necessary. If it were
necessary, then it couldn't be cool.
Or is it okay to demarcate the quote at the start and end as I do?
It disrupts the convention. I would not do this.
--
You won't feel the collar if you don't go anywhere.
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