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Re: draft-gellens-format-03.txt

1999-03-05 08:08:48
In 
<EF5D1B2FF253D11195AA00805FE673BFF3C3F1(_at_)tdmail(_dot_)teledesic(_dot_)com> 
Dan Kohn <dan(_at_)teledesic(_dot_)com> writes:

The new draft looks good.  I think it's just about ready to be submitted
to the IESG.

A few small things:

A few more things.

Although the usual way of quoting, when replying to news/email, is to stick
a single '>' on the front, there are other possibilities, one of which is
'> '. But the proposal as it stands will completely screw up on that. We
need to think about this, because the present text of the usenet-format
proposal actually recommends '> ' as an improvement over '>'. I daresay we
could be talked out of that, but a safer way might be to have specific
parameters which could be set in the Content-Type header to say what the
quote-character and/or the stuffing-character should be.

Indeed, this whole proposal looks a little on the slim side - it solves
one real problem, but only one. There is a scheme by Brad Templeton (which
I have not looked at yet) on
<http://www.templetons.com/tech/proletext.html> which you ought to look
at. I gather that, by using mixed tabs and spaces at the end of a line, it
can encode all sorts of behaviours (anything that can be expressed in
binary), and even more if used on an empty line. And, like your scheme, it
defaults to plain text if it breaks. It may indeed be more complex than is
justified, but I think you should at least have a look.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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