Editing Posting style (section)

===Reply level indication===
A message often includes text from two or more messages exchanged in previous rounds of a long discussion. If an additional quotation marker is inserted at every round, without removing any existing markers, the number of markers at the beginning of each line will show the "level" of the reply, that is, how many rounds have occurred since that line was written. These accumulated markers are usually sufficient to distinguish the parts that came from each message.  Some email interfaces recognize this convention and automatically render each level in a different color. For example:

 <span style="color:red">>>> How is the report coming? --Mary
 </span><span style="color:blue">>>
 >> It will be on your desk by noon. --Joe
 </span><span style="color:magenta">>
 > Sorry Joe, I need it by 11:00 at the latest. --Mary</span>
 
 OK, but it will be missing this month's figures. --Joe

If the discussion is between two parties only, then an even number of markers (including zero) identifies text written by the sender, while an odd number of markers identifies text by the recipient. (In the above example even numbers are Joe's text and odd numbers are Mary's.)

 No problem. 6pm it is then. --Jim
 
 At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:
 <span style="color:red">> Whoa! I need to email a report at 5:30.
 > Could you push it back an hour? --Danny
 >
 > At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote:
 >
 </span><span style="color:blue">>> I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
 >> minutes tonight, starting at 5pm. --Jim</span>

In HTML messages, <code>[[Blockquote element|blockquote]]</code> or <code>dl</code> elements may be nested to achieve the same effect.