From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2000 - 04:22:54 CST
In <20001226192253.2505.qmail@kairos.algonet.se> sommar@algonet.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
Continuing my responses from previous article:
>Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>> 4.3.2. Body Conventions
>>
>>
>> It is a common practice for followup agents to enable the
>> incorporation of the followed-up article (the "precursor") as a
>> quotation. This SHOULD be done by prefacing each line of the quoted
>> text (even if it is empty) with the character ">" (or perhaps with
>> "> " in the case of a previously unquoted line). This will result in
>> multiple levels of ">" when quoted content itself contains quoted
>> content, and it will also facilitate the automatic analysis of
>> articles.
>>
>> NOTE: Posters should edit quoted context to trim it down to the
>> minimum necessary. However, followup agents Ought Not to attempt
>> to enforce this beyond issuing a warning (past attempts to do so
>> have been found to be notably counter-productive).
>> [X11. was SHOULD NOT]
>The first SHOULD is an obvious case of Ought. At least I fail to see
>that we can convice IETF that an interoperability case at stake.
I don't think I agree there. There is a lot of software around that does
useful things when it finds lines starting with 1 or more '>'s. For
example 'par' can be made to reformat complex nested quotations that have
strayed beyond a reasonable line length. There is software that tries to
reconstruct "who said what" from a complex system of quotations. These can
all lead to interoperability problems. The fact that the interoperability
is with a large number of different "features" in many newsreaders, rather
than witb some mandated feature of our document, does not render them less
"interoperable". Moreover, our text does say "it will also facilitate the
automatic analysis of articles". So perhaps we should hear some more
opinions on this one.
>I don't know what RFC850 said, but already good ol' rn permitted you
>to change the quote character, which is highly unrecommendable according
>to this writing.
Yes, it was meant to be highly unrecommendable.
>> The attribution MAY contain also a single Newsgroup name (the one
>> from which the followup is being made), the precursor's Message-ID
>> and/or the precursor's Date and Time. Any of these that are present,
>> SHOULD precede the name and/or email address. However, the inclusion
>> or not of such fields SHOULD always be under the control of the
>> poster.
>> [X12. both SHOULD -> Ought???]
>Definitely. I fail to see the point with specifying the order of the
>attribution line, but I seem to recall that there was a discussion on
>this. I don't include message-ID nor date and time in my attribution
>lines, so I pass. :-)
I think the point was that it was hard to parse unless the order gave you
some extra clue. I agree that most of these things are better left out
(hence the MAY), but lots of systems do seem to include them.
But I take your point about the SHOULD -> Ought, unless anybody disagrees.
>>
>> A "personal signature" is a short closing text automatically added to
>> the end of articles by posting agents, identifying the poster and
>> giving his network addresses, etc. If a poster or posting agent does
>> append such a signature to an article, it MUST be preceded with a
>> delimiter line containing (only) two hyphens (ASCII 45) followed by
>> one SP (ASCII 32). The signature is considered to extend from the
>> last occurrence of that delimiter up to the end of the article (or up
>> to the end of the part in the case of a multipart Mime body).
>> Followup agents, when incorporating quoted text from a precursor,
>> SHOULD NOT include the signature in the quotation. Posting agents
>> Ought to discourage (at least with a warning) signatures of excessive
>> length (4 lines is a commonly accepted limit).
>> [X13. SHOULD NOT -> Ought Not???
>> X14. Ought was SHOULD]
>X13 is no interoperability, so it must be Ought Not.
Hmmm! More opinions? I left it as a SHOULD NOT because, although it is an
act of the user's agent, and an overridable one at that, it does produce
effects which are externally visible, and therefore of concern to people
other than that user.
> In passing, let me
>note that some people add a PS after the signature.
And should be roundly flamed for having signatures of more than 4 lines :-( .
>> 4.4. Characters and Character Sets
>>
>>
>> 4.4.2. Character Sets within Article Bodies
>>
>> Within article bodies, the CES and CCS implied by any Content-
>> Transfer-Encoding and Content-Type headers [RFC 2045] SHOULD be
>> applied by reading agents. In the absence of such headers, reading
>> agents cannot be relied upon to display correctly more than the US-
>> ASCII characters.
>> [Observe that reading agents are not forbidden to "guess", or to
>> interpret as UTF-8 regardless, which would be the simplest course for
>> them to take.]
>Great wording!
Yes, but that wording is pseudo-comment, not intended for the final
document. Do you want me to make it permanent? The "would" would become a
MAY, of course.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 436 6131 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5