When

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

and

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

users respond to a message, they often want to include some context for the discussion. This is often accomplished by quoting a portion of the original message using

conventions. In essence the convention is to communicate in plain text format (not

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

) and quote with ">" at the beginning of each line, ">>" for a quote of quote, and so on. Most email clients can perform Usenet quoting automatically.

Examples

Usenet standard quoting refers to the practice of preceding the original message with the ">" (or right-angle

bracket A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

) character at the beginning of each line, and then inserting one's responses inline, using no special designator for the author's messages.

> hello, how are you?
I am fine

When a second response is made to the second message, the second message is again quoting with >, perhaps causing parts of the original message to now be designated with >>. Such nested quotations can technically be continued indefinitely, but quickly become cumbersome. >> hello, how are you? > I am fine Good, I am also well. Enhanced quoting (such as facilitating by the

Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, ...

supercite module), includes more context by using the initials or a short form of the name. The program has to be careful not to quote already quoted material:

first> hello, how are you?

I am fine.

first> hello, how are you?
second> I am fine.

Good, I am also fine.

It is often the case that it makes sense, particularly in the simple quoting case, to insert a note telling who said what: Last Saturday, when the sun was nice, Second Guy said: > Last thursday, while eating popcorn, First Guy said: >> hello, how are you? > I am fine Good, I am also fine.

Canonical quoting

There is no standard declaring one way of quoting to be "right" and others to be "wrong", but some standards depend on conventions. Th
son-of-1036
draft recommends ">" as the quote-prefix
RFC 3676
depends on it and considers ">> " and "> > " to be semantically different. That is, ">> " has a quote-depth of two, while "> > " has a quote-depth of one, quoting a line starting with ">". For these reasons, ">" is often considered the "canonical" quote-prefix.

Examples

Canonical quoting

See also