Re: tlug: Internet phone and video capture

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Dennis" == Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com> writes:

    Dennis> On Sun, 26 Oct 1997, Alan B. Stone wrote:
    >> At first I thought your email was a little pointed, but after I
    >> thought about it for awhile I realized that you were right, and
    >> you were only pointing out my error.  Thanks again, and sorry.

    Dennis>   Actually, Blaine, you're right.  My tone was more than
    Dennis> "a little pointed", and that really wasn't necessary.
    Dennis> Actually the html message looks really classy, and if take
    Dennis> this opportunity to change my Pine configuration in the
    Dennis> appropriate way, I won't have to jump through any hoops to
    Dennis> read it next time.

This is hilarious!  I'll have to see if I have a copy somewhere in my
autosaves of the message I _didn't_ send (I'm still unable to keep my
finger off the `R' button, but I've learned not to hit `C-c C-c')
after Blaine's first text/html email---it was a lot more than
"pointed".  The message I did send got lost in the spool and never
made it to the list, it wasn't nasty, though.  See below for the
content.

Tokoro de, I'm rather surprised that Pine wants to save the message
body to a file; it shouldn't do that.  Jim S's solution (external
viewer) is unacceptable to me; I read over 200 messages, and sometimes
hit 1000, in a typical day; I don't want the overhead of starting an
external program to see text/* _ever_.

I disagree with that "classy" evaluation, although it's a very
personal thing.  I like email to look like email, and I think `classy'
means following the conventions, artistic and otherwise, that have
grown up on mailing lists and Usenet.  YMMV, of course.  And, of
course, once I've learned to use style sheets I'll be able to override 
that `unclassy' MS-Word look :-)

However, Netscrap (_not_ Blaine, the program itself: no user, not even
a sysadmin, should ever need to know the following---programs should
do this correctly and automatically) is not classy at all, it's just
plain rude:

    Blaine> <PRE>--&nbsp;

This is not a .sig separator.  It does not match the regexp "^-- $",
which as far as I know is still the standard (although not RFC as far
as I can remember).  Not even after HTML decoding: in ISO-8859,
non-break space is _not_ hex 0x20, it's hex 0xA0.  There's no excuse
for this, either.  HTML is not a transport encoding; although some
(broken) mail systems will strip that trailing space, HTML is not the
way to fix it.  Quoted-printable transfer encoding is the right way:

Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<PRE>
--=20

which at least works in all MIME-compliant systems.

So it's broken if you use an MUA that just spits out text/html as if
it were text/plain (like mine), and it's broken if you use an MUA that
correctly converts the character entity.  The use of "&nbsp; " to
separate sentences is a bizarre private convention as far as I know,
but at least it doesn't screw up hallowed usages.

Just say no to software that spews content that only it can read
correctly onto the net.
Next TLUG meeting is Saturday Dec. 13, 1997  (possibly Nov. 13?)
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