> "Email is supposed to be easy to quote"

Since when? I have never heard anyone say this in my entire life. I want emails to look good. So I guess people are different and we can't draw a simple conclusion about what people want from email?

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Is it that you’ve never heard of the concept of quoting a passage of an email? Or are you saying “sure people do that, but it doesn’t matter if it’s easy”?

Or perhaps the parent commenter is part of the lost generation of email users that never properly used quoted replies in email conversations. And this is not necessarily an comment on the age of the parent commenter, but rather about what email programs were common at the time. I blame Outlook mainly for this, but Gmail hasn’t done much to help here either.

The use of quotes in replies is also part of the article and is definitely a better way to go with bottom replies than the current default of top replies.

He means that he’s never heard of it as a “supposed to be”, or rather, a core feature/reason to use email.

Which is my experience as well — it happens to be easy to quote.

The real quoting that email supports, the reply w/ embedded copy of replied email, is unaffected by html/plaintext choice.

Exactly.

> it’s obvious that rich text is difficult to quote

I don't see how. It's just the same as plain text.

It would be easy if there were a single accepted way to quote in rich text. (Seriously, the block quote tag has been around for eternity!) I don't think it works well in plain text either.

HTML has a hierarchical structure.

<div class="quote"> quoted content </div>

It's far better than trying to keep count of how many ">" are in play, and deal with the vagaries of soft linebreaks and hard linebreaks and wrapping of plaintext.

Ok, but then your email client should be smart enough that if, for example, you quote two bullet points from a list it doesn't quote them as

    <div class="quote">
      <li>Second</li>
      <li>Third</li>
    </div>

Without the surrounding `<ul>`. Luckily Thunderbird is smart enough to do this. I don't know about other clients.