Re: Inserting attribution at a better point

[Justin Sheehy <justin@linus.mitre.org>]

Karl Kleinpaste <karl@jprc.com> writes:

> ...versus a re-placement of the 1st attribution, farther into the
> article, thus...
> ________________
> 
> In article <456@foo.bar>, jane@doe.org writes:
> >> Jane's text goes here.
> 
> In article <123@foo.bar>, joe@schmo.net writes:
> > Joe's text goes here, now closely connected to his attribution.

This works for a trivial example like this, but would be of little
help in the common case of multiple attribution:

The outermost layer of attribution (joe) is the one that you are
actually replying to, and the messages that they replied to (jane's)
are included for context.  

If one places their response directly after the bit that is being
responded to, text ordering is important.  People's words are
interspersed for a reason.  

There are some people that seem to think that it is better to simply
include an entire message in one block and to place one's response
above or below the entire original.  Your approach might be useful for
these people, but only because these people's approach is weaker than
the more conventional way of structuring message responses.

> (I observe that I also take out the quotation `> ' from in front of
> Jane's attribution line.  

I don't like that part at all.  It confuses things, as that line was
part of joe's message and thus is quoted by you.

Even if you do rearrange the order of things, I would suggest not
removing any quotation markers.

In general, I don't think that this would be very useful at all.

-- 
Justin Sheehy

In a cloud bones of steel.