Xref: utzoo alt.books.technical:445 comp.os.msdos.programmer:5388 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!sics.se!ifi.uio.no!enag From: enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) Newsgroups: alt.books.technical,comp.os.msdos.programmer Subject: Re: Binary Postings (was: Errata file for UNDOCUMENTED DOS) Message-ID: Date: 29 May 91 22:56:45 GMT References: <1991May25.201843.12565@uwasa.fi> <1991May27.194227.23528@demon.co.uk> <1991May27.222948.13505@robobar.co.uk> <1991May28.165033.3092@tvnews.tv.tek.com> Sender: enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 63 Nntp-Posting-Host: gyda.ifi.uio.no In-Reply-To: dougs@tvnews.tv.tek.com's message of 28 May 91 16: 50:33 GMT Originator: enag@gyda.ifi.uio.no Doug Stevens writes: | | Good grief, I wish a Unix guru somewhere would fix the binary | posting process. The system would work much better if you could | write a header explaining what you are posting, then 'enclose' the | binary as you would on Novell networks, and let the system figure | out how to compress it, uuencode it, and send it. At the other | end, when you want to 'extract' the binary, the system should be | able to uudecode it and decompress it. The problems with this is that _every_ news transport agent in the world must know how to deal with each and every weird format that people might like to move around in news, and _every_ news user agent will have to know how to handle the same weird formats. OK, so your counter-argument is that we could "just" use compress and uuencode and _nothing_ else. For how long do you think this would work out? How long until some PC-based humanoid comes along and thinks "Gee, why can't they use ZIP like everybody else does?" You take it from there. Or rather, the X.400 I-want-an-object-identifier-for-my-fancy-format crowd take you there. Wish them luck, and don't damn them when things don't _interwork_, 'cause you agree with them in principle. | Can you imagine how much programmer time and money a feature like | that could save? "Save programmer time"? Yeah, right. How much have you paid for your USENET news transfer and user agents? Did you say "save money"? | Having a background in both Unix and PC's, it always amazes me | that Unix systems are so much more primitive than PC's when it | comes to posting/sending mail. Well, you're confused. PC's are much better at showing you neat user interfaces. I readily grant you that. Colors, fancy graphics, music and all sorts of fancy things. However, give me one such system on which you can move data around _everywhere_, regardless of format, system, carrier, character set, etc. What, you ask, don't they all have IBM compatible PC's? Why should people care about any other machine type than mine? Unix is good for program input, i.e. input which can come from anywhere, and be sent anywhere. DOS is good for user input, i.e. input which comes only from the user, and will generally only be sent to the user. Now, Unix systems need a little bit of user input systems, as well, which "we" haven't been good at designing. In the meantime, we make do with functionality, good software design, and portability across platforms. DOS lacks all the sound functionality, but has all the nifty display features that, when push comes to shove, don't count. You're welcome to designing a data description language which can be used to describe any given format in such a way that useful infor- mation may get out of it at any site. My guess is that when you've tried this for a while, you come to realize that ordinary, readable text with some structure and syntax is what you want. Binary data formats is not a good idea, because what it might appear to save in some ways, it wastes ten-fold in others. -- Erik Naggum Professional Programmer +47-2-836-863 Naggum Software Electronic Text 0118 OSLO, NORWAY Computer Communications