From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2000 - 14:47:26 CST
J B Moreno <planb@newsreaders.com> writes:
> Posters SHOULD avoid using control characters in US-ASCII (or other
> CCSs) except for tab (ASCII 9), formfeed (ASCII 12), and backspace
> (ASCII 8). Tab signifies sufficient horizontal white space to reach
> the next of a set of fixed positions; posters are warned that there
> is no standard set of positions, so tabs should be avoided if precise
> spacing is essential. Formfeed (which is sometimes referred to as the
> "spoiler character") signifies a point at which a reading agent
> SHOULD pause and await reader interaction before displaying further
> text. Reading agents MUST NOT pass other control characters or escape
> sequences unaltered to the output device.
I assume that the intention of saying "in US-ASCII" is to make it clear
that other characters can be used when the character set is something else
(in other words, MIME trumps all this)? ESC is a valid character in some
Asian encodings and should be passed unaltered to the output device in
some circumstances.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>