Re: hidden citation button gotchas

[gsstark@MIT.EDU (Greg Stark)]

The more i use Gnus, the more i get suspicious of its use of text properties
to hide headers, cited text, and signatures.  My uneasiness comes from the way
i can copy and paste text from the article and never know that i copied
the hidden text until i either save and reopen a file, or until i post news i
see the posting.  i think this is really dangerous and not in line with the
principle of least-surprise. 

There are two other possible implementations, one is too actually remove the
hidden text, the other is to use overlays instead of text properties.  With
overlays it would be possible to hide the hidden text and insert [...] buttons
without actually changing the text, so if you copied the text to another
buffer all the [...] and -- buttons would be magically transformed to the
hidden text as soon as you pasted, instead of later.  If you used the overlay
property after-text then the resulting text would even be free of extraneous
buttons.   This overlay solution  would solve the supercite problem of
inserting cited text with buttons and hidden text instead of the original.


--
greg