On 1/4/2016 6:33 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
Yes, the history is long there but also for other formats or even no
"tag" formats at all, e.g.; just with a tab and name, perhaps.
I'm probably arguing with something you're not actually saying, so feel
free to ignore me if that's the case.
But I feel like you're misunderstanding the degree to which this is part
of the netnews article format. This is not a random convention that just
some people use on the netnews side; it's built into every netnews client
I know of that supports signatures, and is very widely supported on the
reading side as well. (For example, my client does syntax highlighting of
the signature block, greying it out, and supports automatically omitting
the signature from quoted follow-ups.) It was commmon for people on
netnews to point out to others when the signature delimiter was mangled
(missing the trailing space, for instance), and there are netiquette
conventions for acceptable length and related issues. (The Google search
term is "McQuary limit".)
It may be just one of many conventions in email. It is an actual,
interoperable standard in the netnews world, albeit an ad hoc one rather
than a formalized one. Insofar as mail and netnews share a common message
format, "-- " deserves a bit more special attention from the implementor
than, say, random examples of FidoNet conventions. Proper handling is a
quality of implementation issue if you ever touch netnews.
Russ, much of what was done during Fidonet carried on to the
"internet" -- it was and still is pretty much all the same,
Fido.Netmail == Inet.Email, Fido.EchoMail == Inet.NewsGroups, etc.
Mail is Mail. You know that. When you have support for all of them,
including others, like UTI, QWK, you get a better integrated view of
it all. Generally, "Netnews" would be just "mail conference type"
option in a mail hosting product line.
I guess I will wait for an actual proposal. But it sounds more like a
MUA product enhancement or a BCP for MUAs and End Users. Why not
include it with other MUA mail creation "common practices" suggestions
such as the "> " quoting characters, by far, the most popular method
across all mail platforms?
** HLS **
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