At 8:28 AM -0700 8/18/98, Ned Freed wrote:
As for the example you cite, where quoting appears at the beginning of a long
line, I already see it on a regular basis. I'd even say it is fast becoming a
defacto standard way of quoting. In fact what I now see on a regular basis is
the sort of quoting I deliberately used above. And to the extent that
_any_ of
these proposals legitimize flowed text, I see them making this sort of
quoting
more common. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see this particular
proposal as especially bad in this regard. But I'm prepared to live with some
damage to quoting in the short term if we get a better result in the
long term,
especially since I believe damage to quoting scheme in the short term is
inevitable no matter what we do (or don't do).
The draft says that each line of a quoted flowed paragraph must be
quoted with the canonical quote indicator (">" or "> "). It can
therefore be treated as normal text/plain by older agents, or as quoted
flowed by newer ones, in either case being better than what we have
now. So it seems to me that the proposal (if adopted) would make the
problem better, not worse.