Tek 4014/5 emulation

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Fri Jun 16 11:15:59 2000

On Thu, Jun 15, 2000 at 08:30:08AM +0000, Pete Turnbull wrote:
>No they don't; and in any case many list members don't use "HTML
>compatible" or even MIME-aware readers. HTML has no place in email. Email
>does not revolve around M$ Outlook :-)

Hear hear!

>Well, I find the nesting usually makes it easier to retain attribution --

Definitely. Sometimes it gets silly if there are 10 levels of nesting at
once, but usually that's just because people are quoting everything in sight
instead of having the consideration to trim out the parts that are no longer
relevant. So the multi-nested stuff shouldn't be there to begin with.

>and I've never seen any software which can handle post-wrapping and keep
>the correct indentations.

Actually my little homebrew editor has something like that, it will rejustify
a block of text, and remove/reinsert any specified prefix string around the
operation. I use it for reformatting comment blocks in assembly language
source (i.e. fill to the right margin while preserving the "; " or "<tab>; "
prefix on each line). I've always meant to write a stand-alone UNIX version
of that command, for just this reason (to use instead of "{!}fmt -80" in vi).

Putting a quote characters only at the beginning of paragraphs is really
annoying IMHO. It just doesn't catch your eye the way having a prefix on each
line does, and even if the mailer or pager or terminal handles does wrapping
(not necessarily at word boundaries) while you're displaying the msg (which
BTW gets a very distracting series of reverse-video plus signs in the "mutt"
mailer I use), that doesn't help you when you're in the editor composing a
reply to the msg. At least in some editors, you only see 80 columns of long
lines at a time, so in order to read the paragraph you have to arrow your
way through the whole line.

Don't get me started on HTML in email! If the person *created* the message by
simply typing a few lines of ASCII text, why should we see it any other way?
Who said it's supposed to look like a magazine article. It's especially
annoying in plain text mailers, where the actual message text is dwarfed by
the header/trailer boilerplate and pointless font changes and line after line
of &nbsp; strings. And what's up with the quoted-printable crap with all
the equals signs? It's nice to have a way to represent funny characters,
but most of the time you don't need that and even if you do you're taking
a gamble that the person receiving the msg has a terminal which can display
that character. Meanwhile the plain text is all screwed up, especially if
it contains real live equals signs, and some mailers seem to convert every
ocurrence of the letter "F" to "=46", well I suppose that's a workaround
for the UNIX ">From " atrocity which is another constant annoyance. And if
you're going to put "soft" line breaks into the text, at least put them at
the actual line breaks!!!

Boy, I miss the days when the pinnacle of "letter quality" output was to
make it seem as if the author had taken the trouble to type the letter up
on a real live typewriter.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Fri Jun 16 2000 - 11:15:59 BST