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Indented text in HN is monospace and respects newlines (no word wrapping). This makes it unreadable on mobile unless the lines are very short. The generally pr
by thomastjeffery 9y ago
Indented text in HN is monospace and respects newlines (no word wrapping). This makes it unreadable on mobile unless the lines are very short.
The generally preferred way to quote on HN is to begin the line with a > and wrap the quote with * if desired.
It's an issue that comes up too often that HN needs to fix, but here we are.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoThe reason HN does indented text that way is for code. People on HN post code snippets as a fairly regular thing, and having code snippets word wrap (or eat white space) is really confusing. The problem isn't that HN does that with leading space. The problem is that people use leading space for quotations, which isn't what it's for.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoThe problem is that there is no markup for quotes, so people try to fill the void with an indent, which gives the most obvious difference to text.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]