On Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 06:33:03PM -0500, David T-G (dis)graced my inbox with: > % who uses email. And we need to devise a way so that when we quote email, > % we quote it with _their_ quote character, not ours. That way we know who > % wrote it, not who's replying to it ;) > > No, no, no... One doesn't quote oneself as one is initially speaking; > someone else quotes you as he or she replies. The character-selection > algorithm is correct as it stands.
No, no, no... you're not understanding what I'm saying.
When you reply to a message, every line in the quote starts with a '%'.
That means that you're _replying_ to that text, not that you _wrote_ it.
Lets use the above quote as an example. One paragraph starts with >, and
the other with > %. Lets say, for the sake of argument, that % is your
quote character, and > is mine.
This raises a problem: I didn't write what is quoted with the >, you
didn't. And you didn't write what is quoted with the %, /I/ did!
Obviously this system is flawed. It doesn't show us who _wrote_ what, it
shows us who _replied_to_ what. Using the above example, who wrote the
first paragraph is ambiguous, but we can tell that you wrote the second
paragraph because your quote character is on the first paragraph (and we
can tell that I wrote this because my quote character is on the second
paragraph).
So, in order for everybody's quote character to be genuinely useful,
we'll need it to tell use who wrote what, not who replied to what. In
order to do this, stuff that _I_ wrote needs to be prefixed with _my_
quote character, not the character of the person replying to it.
So from now on, everybody has to use > when replying to me, and % when
replying to David. The rest of you can figure out your own quote
characters...
Get it? ;)
--
Rob 'Feztaa' Park
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
"Where would man be today if it wasn't for women? In the
Garden of Eden eating watermelon and taking it easy."
-- C Kennedy
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