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From: wln@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (William L Nussbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Rich Text and comp.sys.next
Message-ID: <1990Nov30.000801.8939@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 30 Nov 90 00:08:01 GMT
References: <4196@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Sender: news@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (The Daily News)
Organization: Columbia University
Lines: 63

In article <4196@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> simsong@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Simson L. Garfinkel) writes:
>Hi.  I'm building a new News reader for the NeXT as part of my PhD research.
>This news reader will also have the ability to post.
>
>One of the things that I've been playing around with is the idea of posting
>Rich Text to newsgroups --- in particular, to comp.sys.next.
>
>Rich text is mostly readable without computer assistance, unlike the 
>compressed, tarred, and uuencoded stuff that NeXT uses for delta-mail.
>Of course, if we wanted to go all the way, would could do full delta-mail
>for the newsgroup, and let people put voice and other sorts of things
>into their netnews messages.
>
>One of the things that has been suggested is embedding font information
>in the header...
>                                       ...My NeXT reader, of course,
>would trash the monofont part and would just show the rich text, (after
>first uudecoding and uncompressing it.)

How about a headerline:

Formats: Text, rnRTF, DeltaMail

in the order the pieces are in the message.  DeltaMail probably isn't a great
idea, given the sort of bulk things which may be enclosed in DeltaMail
require, but for every-once-in-a-while it's a reasonable idea.

I think an extension to RTF to allow you to specify ranges would be needed
for reasonable mail.  That is, for this message, instead of

{\bHow about a headerline:}

you would see:

{\b{\start\linesfromhdr19\char1\end\char23}}

(though the specifiers would be much shorter.  They're long here for purposes
of demonstration).  \linesfromhdr (or \lfh or whatever) would refer to the
n'th line from (and including, in my example; a change to 0-base may or may not
be appropriate...) the first non-blank line following the header.  Mail might
begin with standard text, have an {\rtf999{allthertf}} group after the text,
and DeltaMail format, when necessary, should probably be the last rnRTF group 
and be specified as
{\deltamail
....all the UUENCODE data...
}.

This kind of a structure would also supply a reasonable extended news format
for those people who wanted to implement extended news for another GUI...

...just some thoughts.  Remember that the compactness of these messages is
a relatively significant issue, and that many readers will not have a capable
news reader, and will not want to read RTF or UUENCODE data.  This issue
alone may prove somewhat difficult; any extension (except maybe ^L before
the RTF block begins) will be beyond the knowledge of current news readers;
many readers don't even understand the ^L's, apparently; for these, I'm not
sure what approach you'd take.

LaterOn
 -Lee

| William Lee Nussbaum, Jr.
| wln@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu