dmckeon@hydra.unm.edu (Denis McKeon) (01/26/91)
For anyone using or writing newsposters or citation software - please consider using a citation style which easily allows skipping ALL the included quotes & getting to the NEW material in the posting. (The reader can scroll back to review the discussion if need be.) This is especially aimed at people who quote groups of short paragraphs as: >graf1 line1 >graf1 line2 note that this (really blank) included line is not preceded by '>' >graf2 line1 >graf2 line2 I don't know about newsreaders other than readnews & rn, but using the TAB key in 'rn' will skip all lines that begin with the character that the current line begins with. Thus, a series of inclusions like: >>>> Arnie's article >>> Rob's response >> Jane's rejoinder > Chris' correction can be skipped all at once. But included material like graf1 & graf2 above bollixes this behavior by leaving out the '>' on otherwise blank lines, leaving the reader doing multiple TABs instead of a single TAB. (or, in this reader's case, 'j' works nicely.) For users of supercite, or equivalent software, please consider a style like: >Joe blah, blah > >Tom blah, blah > >Jane blah, blah instead of: Joe > blah, blah Tom > blah, blah Jane > blah, blah I realize that my desire to skip included material conflicts with point-by-point responses like: >pi equals 3.0 no, it doesn't. >the earth is flat no, it is round. In case it isn't obvious, I feel that including material from previous articles is usually redundant for people using newsreaders that do any thread-following at all. Given that opinion, I don't much care what method is used to credit included material, as long as I can skip it most of the time. (Ever consider that we are just re-inventing footnotes? :-)) Some people may feel that conserving network bandwidth is important, but I feel that conserving the human news reader's screen and keyboard time is more important. If there are other approaches I can use at the newsreader end, (a macro to skip to the last '>' (or equivalent character) in the article & display from there onward?) I'd be happy to hear about them. I'll consider changing newsreaders if any of them offer a better search & thread-following strategy than 'rn' (in ^N mode). What I'd really like is to use something like '=' to review subjects, then issue a multiple search sequence for several strings, and also have searching run a push-down stack for each string and subject, so rather than a search sequence like: /quot <rn presents sequence of articles with subject lines: Subject: Re: Quoting and followups Subject: Re: Quoting and followups Subject: Re: Quoting and followups, another view Subject: Re: Quoting and followups, another view <no more articles with the added 'another view' string, and thus <rn presents first unread article, regardless of whether there are more <articles without the added 'another view' string, or with any 'quot' string instead, you might have a search sequence like: /quot/,/kill/,/BIX/ <rn presents sequence of articles with subject lines: Subject: Re: Quoting and followups Subject: Re: Quoting and followups Subject: Re: Quoting and followups, another view Subject: Re: Quoting and followups, another view Subject: Re: Quoting and followups, LONG Subject: Famous Quotation database ? Subject: Kill file syntax Subject: Kill file syntax, explained Subject: Kill file syntax Subject: Killer Whales Subject: BIX gateway Subject: BIX address I'd also like a replacement for '=' that instead of producing: 1234 Subject: Re: Quoting and followups 1235 Subject: Re: Quoting and followups 1236 Subject: Re: Quoting and followups, another view 1237 Subject: Re: Quoting and followups, another view 1238 Subject: Re: Quoting and followups <continues for several screens> produces a frequency count in descending order 3 Subject: Re: Quoting and followups 2 Subject: Re: Quoting and followups, another view <etc., continues for fewer screens> macros that perform (this or similar) actions & other reasonable suggestions cheerfully accepted. Please note that I won't switch newsreaders without a few good reasons to do so - the time and effort involved in finding, compiling, learning, tuning, and patching would have to pay off in a few months to be considered. Thanks for your time, patience, and thought - responses by e-mail or followup welcome. -- Denis dmckeon@hydra.unm.edu