Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!ncar!boulder!gore!jacob
From: jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Rich Text and comp.sys.next
Message-ID: <130125@gore.com>
Date: 1 Dec 90 17:46:44 GMT
References: <4196@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore)
Organization: Gore Enterprises
Lines: 80

/ simsong@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Simson L. Garfinkel) / Nov 29, 1990 /
> 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.

Hmm...

> Rich Text is ...

 ... standard feature on the NeXT, can easily be created with Edit.

> Rich text is mostly readable without computer assistance,

That's a matter of opinion...

> unlike the 
> compressed, tarred, and uuencoded stuff that NeXT uses for delta-mail.

This, of course, is unreadable.  However, there is a good reason to
uuencode RTF before sendint it out through the networks: to take full
advantage of it, one takes full advantage of the fonts, which sticks 8-bit
characters into the file.  For example, the en dash would be used to
indicate range instead of "-", and the em dash would be used for the dash
instead of "--".  However, both of those are in the upper half of the byte.
The problem is that many network mail (and UUCP) protocols are 7-bit, and
they strip the 8th bit off (or use it for parity).  Thus, "pp. 12-15",
where the "-" is the en dash, comes out something like "pp. 12115".

> 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.

Yeah, but we'll probably need to get a different distribution.  Most Usenet
sites will probably drop comp.sys.next if its traffic becomes that of a
binary group (which is what posting voice and images will do).

> One of the things that has been suggested is embedding font information
> in the header, but this would be difficult, actually, and of questioanble
> worth.

It may not be difficult to factor out all the markup information into a
separate section.  If that can be done, the header is as good a place to
store that section as any.

> Another idea is to include monofont at the top of the message
> and follow it with uuencoded, compressed, rich text at the end.  This would
> let people with standard "rn" read the message.  My NeXT reader, of course,
> would trash the monofont part and would just show the rich text, (after
> first uudecoding and uncompressing it.)

If you do that, you may as well have two parallel newsgroups.  Have each
doubly-encoded message look like it's cross-posted, and read the RTF group
first.  This way, sites can choose not to receive the encoded stuff.


Some general comments now:

1.  Eric Raymond's News 3.0 package (formerly known as TMNN, Teenage Mutant
Ninja Netnews, so named before the little green morons became the hype of
the world).  It has libraries and character-stream clients that does most
of the message access work for you, and the same interface is used for
local and NNTP access.  Save yourself a ton of work, contact him at
eric@snark.thyrsus.com.

2.  It annoys me that everybody, including NeXT, is going out of their way to
improve the appearance of electronic communications, while sacrificing
user's editing habits.  I've been bitching about being unable to use Emacs
to create messages ever since I started using the machine, in 0.8 days.
Result from NeXT: none.  Result from me: I don't use NeXT Mail.  I have
MMDF installed instead of sendmail, and I use msg to read and write mail.
Msg respects users' preferences for various editors, while Mail sticks you
with the Text object.

No matter how spiffy your newsreader is, I'm not likely to use it unless it
lets me use Emacs to compose my messages.

Jacob
--
Jacob Gore		Jacob@Gore.Com			boulder!gore!jacob