On 2021/02/14 23:40, Cameron Simpson wrote:
[format=flowed] is quite conservations, to minimise the implementation burden. And that frugality is likely where the inflexibility about ">" comes from.
I think it's to avoid ambiguity. A line that starts with "> " could have been quoted that way, or the original line could have started with a space. This is true even without format=flowed.
Also, format=flowed does space-stuffing at the beginnings of lines, required for some lines, allowed on all lines, and those stuffed spaces are to the right of any quoting characters. A line that starts with "> " is interpreted as one level of quoting plus space-stuffing. See RFC 3676, section 4.5.
