> I'll use whatever seems most appropriate for my reply. What does occasionally bug me is the way in which angle brackets are used. It's much easier to read this...
>
> ((Neatly boxed in quote))
>
> My response to the quote.

Well, I'll use this opportunity to advocate my own practice in quoting. Notice that I delete the bracket in the empty line above this paragraph. This is crucial to the readability. Notice also that I include *two* empty lines before the next quote.


> Than it is to read this...
>
> >Here's some more made-up quoted text, but I'm making it a bit longer to demonstrate my point. This is how text appears when the angle brackets >>are generated automatically and mangled a couple of times by various different browsers and mail programs or whatever.
> >
> My reponse just looks like the second paragraph of the quoted text, right?

This is a practice I've developed over the last few years. There's a basic principle of the mind's understanding of groups that go naturally together: The distance between letters is smaller than the distance between words. The distance between words is smaller than the distance between lines. The distance between lines is smaller than the distance between paragraphs.

Thus, the distance between paragraphs naturally belonging together (such as the quote-and-reply units) should be smaller than the distance between the groups of paragraphs.


Trav"advocat of readability"holt.