From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Apr 09 2001 - 04:40:42 CDT
In <7zRHxa7Xw-B@khms.westfalen.de> kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) writes:
>rra@stanford.edu (Russ Allbery) wrote on 04.04.01 in <ylg0fo2hyi.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu>:
>> I have a similar problem with any standard that *requires* that something
>> be done with signatures. If the message is declared text/plain with no
>> attributes, you don't know that that's a signature, and nothing in the
>> standard says that you can make that determination. Requiring ad hoc
>> parsing is the fundamentally wrong approach. It's simply bad engineering.
I think everything we have done with signatures and quoting is just
confirming, and possibly tidying up, what is current practice. The same
for the form feed character, which retains essentially the meaning given
to it by ASCII.
>As much of this "informal markup" stuff is also useful in mail, the usefor
>*standard* may not be the right place for this anyway, but I suspect I'll
>find most interested people here.
>Format=flowed (which includes signature and quote characters) went out as
>proposed standard; I don't know if that would really buy us anything here,
>so I suspect an informational RFC would be just fine.
Format-flowed is the Gelens system, right?
Much as I would like such a system, I think that particular proposal is
too weak. It could have done much more, with minimal extra trouble and
well within its remit (notably indentation).
Brad also had a system that was more complicated, byt workable. But I
cannot see it catching on.
>Spoiler-char use of form feed
>*bold* _underlined_ and /slanted/ text
>Possibly mention various backspace-highlighting methods as not really
>appropriate to this format
What happened to text/rtf. Does anyone implement it? Or use it?
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk 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