| On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 21:06:17 -0000, "Ivor Jones"
|
|>
|>|>: > In article <
[email protected]>,
|>
|>: >> Nobody's forcing you to read my message. Which is
|>: >> written in plain text, by the way. If you can't cope
|>: >> with a simple : character in a bit of ASCII text,
|>: >> tough.
|>: >
|>: > I think the only real issue is that ":" could appear
|>: > naturally in a "plain text" email as it is a standard
|>: > punctuation mark, ">" is far less likely though I
|>: > suppose ": :" is unlikely too.
|>
|>But what is the objection..? I just don't get it. I've been on Usenet for
|>over 10 years and nobody has *ever* complained about this before.
|>
|>Ivor
|
| I went poking through the RFC's including 3977, 2980, and 1036. None
| of them specified a quoting character for Usenet. Can anyone find one
| that does?
I have never seen one. That would suggest any character is allowed. The
first indenting I ever saw was with ">" either with or without a space.
The space isn't required, either. It seems most use a space following the
character they use, so it could be considered customary. But without the
space there isn't any misleading indications; it's just a tad bit harder
to read, but not much (and others may find it the other way around). What
is a problem is when someone indents the text in such a way that it looks
like it was indented then indented again. It looks like such a poster is
quoting someone who quoted someone else when in fact they are just merely
quoting someone. It doesn't matter what character they are choosing.