Inserting attribution at a better point

[Karl Kleinpaste <karl@jprc.com>]

I was just reading/commenting in news.software.readers about the
problems of logically connecting attribution lines with a writers' own
text.  It seems to me that putting the attribution at the very top of
an article is not at all the right place; it should be put immediately
prior to the first unquoted text instead, to connect the writer with
his text better.

That is, the question revolves around the typical format...
________________

In article <123@foo.bar>, joe@schmo.net writes:
> In article <456@foo.bar>, jane@doe.org writes:

>> Jane's text goes here, which is appropriate because it's right
>> beside the attribution for her.

> Joe's text goes here, but it's now a significant distance from the
> attribution which identifies Joe.

New text continues hereafter.
________________

...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.

New text continues hereafter.
________________

Nth-level quotations make the problem of the 1st format all the worse,
because attributions get progressively farther from the text each
writer contributed to the resulting discussion.  Per-depth quotation
coloring helps, but does not solve this problem.  That's why I'd like
to see the 2nd format become possible in Gnus.

(I observe that I also take out the quotation `> ' from in front of
Jane's attribution line.  I'm not sure whether that is /really/
appropriate or not, but I confess that it's how I manually re-work
quotation format whenever I followup.)

How do others feel about this?

--karl