4 ms·

Ah I see, I got it wrong.

• Stratoscope 8y ago
  No worries, it's an easy mistake to make. The formatting options on HN are pretty meager: two leading spaces (not four like Markdown) for block code, asterisks for emphasis. So it's natural that people try to make do with what's available. I don't mind, I get a lot of upvotes for posting those mobile friendly quotes. Just call me the Quote Fixer Bot. ;-) Markdown recognizes the > quote convention and puts the text in a <blockquote> so it can be styled, typically indented a bit with a vertical bar on the left. I wish HN did that too! A convention that is often used for quotes here is to both use the > and italicize them, like this: > *You can quote me on this.* which renders as: > You can quote me on this. This is especially useful when you are interspersing quotes with your own text, as grzm did above. I can't make up my mind which I like better for longer multi-paragraph quotes: the italics make it look more like a quote, but I find long stretches of italic text harder to read.
  • bradleyjg 8y ago
    The leading greater than is the old usenet and mailing list convention. With multiple greater thans for deeper levels of quotes. There wasn’t italics but people used to surround words with stars or underscores for emphasis.
  • srean 8y ago
    You are too patient and kind.