boxquote (was: Suggestion: Minor changes to etc/MORE.STUFF (diff attached))

[Jesper Harder]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> No, since every news reader knows how to deal with those cited lines:
> _those_ citations are _well-established_.

Yes, the rules for quoting (or citing) what the previous author wrote
are well established (prepend '>'), and you shouldn't mess with this
format. I agree with you that Supercite is evil because it does that.

But boxquote isn't about quoting the previous author. Its only purpose
is to convey the same meaning in plain text as <blockquote> would do
in HTML.

> mml-attach-file gives _every_ mail client a chance to make the
> included file available in a readable manner, suitably for
> requoting, resending, extraction, manipulation.

MIME attachments aren't really intended for small inline quotes. It
would probably work reasonably well most of the time in Gnus, but it's
not a viable solution because:

   1. Attachments are frowned upon on most of Usenet.
   2. The way inline text attachments are displayed by many clients would
      make this very unfriendly for (probably) the majority of readers.

> boxquote.el doesn't.  You need rectangle operations and similar
> stuff not usually available in a mail client to have a remote chance
> of cutting and pasting the content.

I see your point. But you would also need some text manipulation to
remove the leading spaces if you just display the blockquote in the
simplest way by indentation, e.g.

     Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time
     display editor.  This Info file describes how to edit with Emacs
     and some of how to customize it; it corresponds to GNU Emacs
     version 22.0.91.