Selective quoting (was: Re: GNKSA and Gnus)

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:

> Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:
> 
> > This is something Gravity does, and in general a good idea.  It migth
> > make less sense for Gnus.  However, I think it would be nice if quoting
> > would be restricted to the currently region in the messsage being
> > quoted, iff `transient-message-mode' is on, and the region is active.
> 
> I still don't think this idea makes any sense.  But YMMV.

Think of the typical new user with a windows based newsreader.  Would
you rather have that 

1) He had to select which parts of the article to quote, or
2) he had to select which parts of the article not to quote?

I'd prefer #1, since I believe that having to make an explicit
decision to quote some text would encourage him to only quote the
relevant parts of the message.  

Now Gnus is different because it is part of Emacs, and the commands
must make sense within that frameworks, and Gnus users are in average
more experienced than, say, users of MS Internet News.  Thus, you
don't see as many beginner-errors with Gnus, and adding extra code to
prevent them makes less sense in that context.