4 ms·
Quoting with a greater than sign, which is what I infer you are talking about, pre-dates 4chan by years. It was used on Usenet long before 4chan even existed.
by JdeBP 8y ago
Quoting with a greater than sign, which is what I infer you are talking about, pre-dates 4chan by years. It was used on Usenet long before 4chan even existed.
Eric S. Raymond blamed it on an attempt to simulate having tabstops in every column, i.e. 1 character wide tabs.
* http://catb.org/jargon/html/email-style.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/email-style.html
- 0942v8653 8y agoCertainly. But I think the gp is referring to the idea of putting a single greater-than sign at the beginning of a long, soft-wrapped paragraph. 4chan (and other sites) would highlight the whole paragraph, but on HN if it is very long it isn't immediately obvious that it's a quote. Hard-wrapping the quote and putting a greater-than sign in front of each line, as in email or Usenet is much clearer than the style typically used on HN.
- JdeBP 8y agoThat sort of quoting long pre-dates 4chan, too. It's the Fidonet convention for paragraphing.