Xref: utzoo news.newusers.questions:3816 news.software.b:6722 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!news.cs.indiana.edu!ariel.unm.edu!hydra.unm.edu!dmckeon From: dmckeon@hydra.unm.edu (Denis McKeon) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions,news.software.b Subject: Re: Quoting and followups Message-ID: <1991Jan25.184727.3201@ariel.unm.edu> Date: 25 Jan 91 18:46:40 GMT References: Followup-To: news.newusers.questions Organization: Connemara - Computing for People Lines: 127 X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.0.3 12/22/89) Status: OR For anyone using or writing newsposters or citation software - please consider using a citation style which easily allows skipping ALL the included quotes & getting to the NEW material in the posting. (The reader can scroll back to review the discussion if need be.) This is especially aimed at people who quote groups of short paragraphs as: >graf1 line1 >graf1 line2 note that this (really blank) included line is not preceded by '>' >graf2 line1 >graf2 line2 I don't know about newsreaders other than readnews & rn, but using the TAB key in 'rn' will skip all lines that begin with the character that the current line begins with. Thus, a series of inclusions like: >>>> Arnie's article >>> Rob's response >> Jane's rejoinder > Chris' correction can be skipped all at once. But included material like graf1 & graf2 above bollixes this behavior by leaving out the '>' on otherwise blank lines, leaving the reader doing multiple TABs instead of a single TAB. (or, in this reader's case, 'j' works nicely.) For users of supercite, or equivalent software, please consider a style like: >Joe blah, blah > >Tom blah, blah > >Jane blah, blah instead of: Joe > blah, blah Tom > blah, blah Jane > blah, blah I realize that my desire to skip included material conflicts with point-by-point responses like: >pi equals 3.0 no, it doesn't. >the earth is flat no, it is round. In case it isn't obvious, I feel that including material from previous articles is usually redundant for people using newsreaders that do any thread-following at all. Given that opinion, I don't much care what method is used to credit included material, as long as I can skip it most of the time. (Ever consider that we are just re-inventing footnotes? :-)) Some people may feel that conserving network bandwidth is important, but I feel that conserving the human news reader's screen and keyboard time is more important. If there are other approaches I can use at the newsreader end, (a macro to skip to the last '>' (or equivalent character) in the article & display from there onward?) I'd be happy to hear about them. I'll consider changing newsreaders if any of them offer a better search & thread-following strategy than 'rn' (in ^N mode). What I'd really like is to use something like '=' to review subjects, then issue a multiple search sequence for several strings, and also have searching run a push-down stack for each string and subject, so rather than a search sequence like: /quot