OT: What's with using monotype for quotes? That's breaks line wrapping and makes it hard to read on mobile or small screens. I don't get why people do it.
"People" don't do it; HN does it. Indented lines in a post are always monospaced, on the assumption, I suppose, that they're likely to be code examples. There's no way to turn this off AFAIK.
I know the formatting system. My question is why the users are formatting their text (e.g. with 4 places leading each line) *suc that HN renders it as monospace, which then forces a sideways scroll on mobile and small screens. That seems to make it harder to read for some with no corresponding upside.
I think mostly people forget that > works and that therefore you can do
> quotes like this
since it's markdown - often you get commentish things that allow limited HTML plus indented code blocks, and people get used to using the latter as the only thing that works everywhere
not really: http://i.imgur.com/uxqERat.png (you have to be very careful about what indentation level you're at, how long your lines are, etc, etc, things that people just don't do most of the time)
It's also customary when quoting large sections of text. I'm not sure if this carried over from email, or from academic texts (where if your quote is more than a line or two, it needs to be formatted differently).
