From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 09 2002 - 06:27:13 CDT
In <ylhejataoc.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>> Actually, Russ's words also cover the matter of transporting such
>> characters, which is already covered elsewhere (relayers MUST either
>> copy everything or drop it). Moreover, mentioning control characters
>> might just encourage the mess sendmail has gotten itself into by
>> dropping 0c80-9F.
>My language is describing the actions of a *news reader* when presenting
>the article to the user. It's pretty much impossible to end up with that
>problem when you're a news reader presenting the article to a user because
>you're by definition a leaf node. It's impossible for any corruption
>introduced at that point to propagate in any sort of automated fashion.
>A news reader does need to be careful not to display raw control
>characters, whether you want to put that information into the standard or
>not. I have no strong opinion over whether to include it; if included, it
>does belong in a note, and I can buy the argument that it's bloat.
Yes, I think it would be a bit bloatish, and if we did want to say that, I
don't think we would want to do it here (since it applies equally to the
ASCII control characters as to the ISO-8859-1 ones). And actually, we do
mention the matter in 4.3.1 (Body Format Issues) where we say that the
control characters Tab, Backspace and Formfeed are the only ones that
might used, but that caution is needed even then.
>I do oppose any language that implies that the news reader should display
>control characters verbatim, though, because that's just dangerous. If
>the news reader is running on a platform where 0x80-0x9F are control
>characters (unlikely), it *does* need to strip, encode, or otherwise not
>display them verbatim.
What do you mean by "verbatim". If you mean "don't throw the naked control
characters at your display", then fine. But I presume you have no
objection to rendering ESC as a literal ^[ or as \033.
-- 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