Re: Help with quoting

[David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu>]

Thompa <Thompa@hotmail.com> writes:

> A (very) long time ago I used to use Gnus/Emacs for newsreading
> (+10 years) and now I've forgot all (almost) about it. I remember
> using som fancy quoting mechanism called supersite or something similar
> but I don't remebre how it worked. Anyone who can tell me how it works?

SuperCite?  There's some mention of it in the various manuals; the
usual use of it seems to be to include people's initials in the
quoting.

> Is it in Gnus/Emacs by default nowadays?

I think it ships with both Emacsen, in sc.el.

For a while a couple of years ago it seemed like everyone was using
it, but it's mostly faded.  It didn't do the specific thing I wanted
it to do (indent nested quotes *and* cite by name); it was also
annoying to deal quoting people who quoted messages not using
supercite, and supercite exacerbated the problem of screwing up
citations (now not only do you have the wrong "Foo writes:" citation
line but you've put the wrong initials in front of everything Bar
wrote).  Then SuperCite seems to have faded, and the world seems to be
a slightly better place for it.

There are still alternate citation packages, and the one I've seen the
most mention of is trivial-cite.  I'm not entirely clear what it gets
you, though.

The current trendy "I use Gnus so my mail looks special" frob is the
Face: header, which is a base64-encoded 48x48 PNG image in a mail/news
header.  Personally, I only use it for Usenet postings and mail to the
ding list, but I think most people don't actually pay attention to the
headers or the extra ~1K of message length (if they did, they wouldn't
use Exchange/Outlook).

  --dzm