On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Ian Bell wrote:
I think you're missing the advantage of the "paragraph" label.
A reply to a paragraph within a text/paragraph body part that looks like
A message with ... ... a very long line.
would, if the entire paragraph is quoted with the standard marker, be
>A message with ... ... a very long line.
Won't happen. Actually, it COULD happen, but the burden
is placed squarely on the back of the user agent to deal with this.
We can then fairly point the finger at the clear offender.
which may get displayed as
>A message with ...
>... a very long line.
or
>A message with ...
... a very long line.
In a world where text/paragraph is a properly defined standard,
the latter is wrong. Period. If the user doesn't care, then do we?
I certainly care, and would complain loudly to my MUA vendor.
depending on whether the MUA decides to do anything at all about quoted
material (current draft says MUAs "MAY wish to consider" quoting
conventions).
Excellent point. Stronger wording is in order there.
The user, if presented with the second version, will say that the message
display is broken because text is being mis-attributed. The retort here
could simply be that the MUA displaying the message is broken because it
is displaying the message sub-optimally. Bad, but the finger of blame gets
pointed at that MUA.
The light goes on for me. (It takes a while.)
You're worried about mis-quotes being sent, not so much
mis-quotes displayed. Good point. I don't see a way to reliably
coerce the replying MUA into compliance. Does that make the
standard bad? No.
In order to display this message properly to the user (ie to give the
correct impression of who said what), the receiving MUA is going to have
to successfully parse these forms. Any failure in display can't really be
put at the door of the MUA as there is no RFC that governs quoting
conventions - the failure comes from the media-type itself. At this point,
though, the message itself won't be broken since examining the source
line-breaks will determine correctly the authors involved.
The closest thing I've seen is HTML (which is annoying
when sent through mail, as some will agree). I can imagine
nesting of blocks of quoted material.
The conclusion must be that using _any_ quote character when replying in
text/paragraph may cause damage to the ensuing conversation thread. The
problem does not lie in MUAs but in text/paragraph itself.
This connection I do NOT see.
--
Ian Bell T U R N P I K E Ltd
--
Rick Troth at La Casita, Houston, Texas, USA