From: J.B. Moreno (planb@newsreaders.com)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2000 - 13:46:35 CST
On 12/28/00 5:22 AM, Charles Lindsey at <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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
-snip-
>> 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.
Mine agree's with yours -- definitely a SHOULD.
-snip-
>>> 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.
Again, I agree with you.
And I don't see a problem with specifying this behavior -- it is no
different than saying that this or that header isn't persistent, or that the
headers aren't supposed to be regularly copied into the body when quoting.
>> 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 :-( .
And irrelevant besides -- I can put a PS in an X-PS header, but it shouldn't
automatically be copied into the body of a followup.
If the reader (person) sees it and wants to address it, then some extra
steps (or at least different steps) have to be taken to make that possible,
but that is no different than asking what the zip code is or who was the
famous person that you are quoting in your sig was -- if the user wants to
comment upon the sig then he can do so, just as he can comment upon your
Organization header or anything else he wants to. But in neither case
should it be automatically included as part of the quoted text.
>>> 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.
I like it just as it is, make it a note and it's done.
I think a "MAY" would be a bit strong -- the beauty of the comment lies in
the fact that it clearly leaves it wide open while at the same time
suggesting to sensible courses of action. Recipients have a clue as what to
do and senders are warned that recipients may do anything or nothing.
-- John Moreno