Re: Apple IIe TCP-IP w/ LANceGS Card

[Jeff Blakeney <CUTjblakeney@sympatico.ca>]

On Fri, 26 Dec 2003 16:10:25 GMT, NoEmail@NoEmail.NoNet (copper wire)
wrote:

>Ah, so that's the reason that Bill Garber's posts have that garbage "=20"
>included at the end of every single line of his posts.

I'm not sure if my newsreader is doing it or not but I don't recall
seeing any "=20" in Bill Garber's posts so maybe my newsreader is
removing them before showing me the message.  If it is, it is a nice
thing for it to do but it definitely shouldn't have to do it at all.

>In any event, it's extremely annoying to read posts with that extra
>garbage embedded in the text.

Have you ever had to try to read a post that was sent in HTML only
with font and colour changes in it and has no plain text version
included?  That is much more annoying than reading a message that has
an "=20" at the end of each line.  :-)

>I'm sure there's plenty of good freeware and shareware newsreaders
>available for the Windows platform that would be better to use than MS's
>Outlook Express, but for those who insist on using OE, perhaps it would be
>courteous and wise to turn off the quoted-printable feature in your
>preferences settings (or whereever it's found).  Just a suggestion, but
>I'm sure most people would agree with this suggestion.

I use Forte's Free Agent newsreader.  It is completely free but lacks
a couple features that I don't really need that are included in the
commercial version called Agent.

It defaults to the proper way things should be done including putting
replies at the bottom of quoted text rather than top posting like some
people's newreaders do.  :-)


>USENET postings (and likewise EMAIL) should be plain text and free of all
>junk characters and HTML in my opinion.

Yes, messages should all be 7-bit ASCII as you are only guaranteed a
7-bit connection from the sender to the recipient.  However, I
wouldn't mind some extra 7-bit characters to allow for fonts, styles
and colours as long as it is kept small and unobtrusive.  The message
should be sent as plain text and any font, style and colour
information should be sent as an encoded attachment that just tells
the viewer what font, style and colour to use where when displaying
the text.

Unfortunately, the way things work now is that they put a plain text
version of a message as one part and the HTML version as a second
part.  Both these parts have the exact same text appearing in them and
the HTML version has a bunch of extra mark up text as well so you end
up with an e-mail that is more than twice the size of the plain text
version.  You could get by with something that should never be any
more than 50% bigger than the plain text version.

Guess I should create an RFC for the method I would like to see in use
and see if it catches on.  :-)

-- 
 Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II University in the
                 Apple II Community on Syndicomm.com
 CUT the obvious from my address if you want to e-mail me