GNU Info
(sc)Citations
Citations
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A "citation" is the acknowledgement of the original author of a mail
message in the body of the reply. There are two basic citation styles
which Supercite supports. The first, called "nested citations" is an
anonymous form of citation; in other words, an indication is made that
the cited line was written by someone _other_ that the current message
author (i.e., other than you, the person composing the reply), but no
reference is made as to the identity of the original author. This
style should look familiar since its use on the net is widespread.
Here's an example of what a message buffer would look like using nested
citations after multiple replies:
>> John originally wrote this
>> and this as well
> Jane said that John didn't know
> what he was talking about
And that's what I think too.
Note that multiple inclusions of the original messages result in a
nesting of the ``>'' characters. This can sometimes be quite confusing
when many levels of citations are included since it may be difficult or
impossible to figure out who actually participated in the thread, and
multiple nesting of ``>'' characters can sometimes make the message
very difficult for the eye to scan.
In "non-nested citations", each cited line begins with an
informative string attributing that line to the original author. Only
the first level of attribution will be shown; subsequent citations don't
nest the citation strings. The above dialog might look like this when
non-nested citations are used:
John> John originally wrote this
John> and this as well
Jane> Jane said that John didn't know
Jane> what he was talking about
And that's what I think too.
Notice here that my inclusion of Jane's inclusion of John's original
message did not result in a line cited with `Jane>John>'.
Supercite supports both styles of citation, and the variable
`sc-nested-citation-p' controls which style it will use when citing
previously uncited text. When this variable is `nil' (the default),
non-nested citations are used. When non-`nil', nested citations are
used.
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