[pmmail-list] other textcolor for quoting

[Kenneth Porter]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2001 14:45:58 -0800, Warner Young wrote:

>The idea being that PMMail simply colors the line when displaying to
>you, without adding HTML code.  The downside, if you can call it that,
>is that if you then reply to someone who doesn't use PMMail, the reply
>section may or may not be colored when they read it.

Color should be in the eye of the beholder, not the composer. Mail
should always be simple text. Anything fancy should be reserved for
attachments. In my experience, HTML only serves to hide the fact that a
message has no true content. It's the equivalent of humming on the
telephone because you have nothing to say.

It *is* important that everyone settle on a common quoting character,
so that reader software can easily identify quoted paragraphs. The
"standard" with news postings is ">", and it makes sense to stick with
that for email composition software. (Leading or trailing white space
should be ignored.)

Xnews actually provides the additional option of displaying quoted text
with a different font, and a smaller italic typeface is common for this
purpose.

A couple of other nice Xnews quoting features: Bottom-posting is
encouraged because it makes interleaved responses easier to read. To
this end, when replying, Xnews places the cursor *after* the quoted
text, not before it. (Another option would be to put the cursor at the
end of the first quoted paragraph.) The Xnews reader also provides a
toolbar button to skip to the next unquoted paragraph, so one can
quickly skip a quoted block to get to the next reply paragraph.

Ken
mailto:shiva@well.com
http://www.sewingwitch.com/ken/
[If answering a mailing list posting, please don't cc me your reply. I'll take my answer on the list.]



- pmmail-list - The PMMail Dicussion List ---------------------------
To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message to mdaemon@bmtmicro.com with the first 
line of the message body being...
UNSUBSCRIBE pmmail-list@blueprintsoftwareworks.com