Thread Subject: blockquotes

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From: Bailey Bruce
Date: Wed, Oct 18 2006 9:50 PM

Quotation marks before long excerpts of someone else's email is not helpful. I know Andi suggested it, but can anyone provide a link to an article that explains the rational and subtleties of the technique? I am not comfortable abandoning thirty years (more?) of established usenet practice just because of someone's personal preferences, even if that person is Curtis! The other technique I have seen is to write the word BLOCKQUOTE before and after long blocks of quotation. That is considerably better IMHO than relying on a single character that is easily overlooked visually and by the screen reader (depending on the punctuation verbosity settings). I would also recommend providing the citation source before the block quote or, even better, omit the long quote all together and just write full sentences. The latter approach can be supplemented by providing a link to the persons comments in the archive. These approaches work better for everyone, including people using assistive technology like screen readers. Two examples:

I agree with what Jared so well articulated at URL:
http://teitac.org/mailarchives/mail_message.php?id=273&listid=10

Jared recently wrote about the role of the wiki versus the role of the discussion lists. I would like to explicitly state my endorsement of that view.

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