* Thomas Hurst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-04- 1 02:52:00 +0100]: >* John Buttery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: >^ The problem with using just '>' is that the quote string merges with >the text and becomes difficult to disinguish, not only for users, but >for reflowing algorithms which often have to put up with crap like: > >| %>>JF > Bla bla > >That space goes a long way to ease working out what's a >INITAL quote >and what's not.
Hmm. That's a good point. Not so much the human parseability angle, but I suppose it would make things easier for the machine parsers. >please don't say: > >>>>>>>Foo bar wibble > >is better because it saves a single character. I personally find Well, of course it's better for that reason. Sure it's a small improvement, but some is better than none. However, it's quite possible that the reasons for doing it the other way outweigh the space savings. >quoting without a space after the quote more irritating than any of the >exotic quote strings I've come across, with the possible exception of: > >C=This is quoted text >C=Bla bla bla >C= >C=Cookie to whoever works out what this brain dead quote string is >C=supposed to represent. Yeah; the thing about that quoting is that it can be useful to trace heavily-nested attributions when people mangle/remove some/all of the attribution lines. Of course, the real fix for this is for the previous repliers to have quoted properly, not to introduce a multi-character quote...um...character. :) I like your idea of "squashing" all leading > characters, but leaving a space after the group as a whole. That would save some space, and not make things any harder on the parsers, since you're still looking at "( zero or more ( > characters followed by zero or one spaces ) ) followed by a space". I'll have to percolate on this some, maybe I need to change my quote string back. No biscuit for the person who said ">" was nonstandard, you know who you are. :) -- mmmmmmmmmmmm...floor pie...
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