Re: Apple IIe TCP-IP w/ LANceGS Card

[dalloff@gcfn.org (Dave Althoff Jr)]

Jeff Blakeney (CUTjblakeney@sympatico.ca) wrote:

: >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.

Where have I seen this scheme used before...8-)  (user turns to the IIgs,
launches an application, and looks that the About... window) ...Selhorst,
Mensch, Glass, and Lyons.  I don't see Blakeney on that list.  8-)

: 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.

Worse than that, there is lots and lots of useless extra mark-up in there
because ********* doesn't know how to generate HTML.  Even worse,
something is broken in the headers of such email messages so that when I
get the message in PINE, it tells me it can't read the plain text version,
and it displays the munged up HTML version.

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

Or just implement it by fiat.  That's what You Know Who does.  They say
it, they implement it in their software, and clueless users think it's
right even though it isn't.

--Dave Althoff, ][.
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