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From: dce@mips.UUCP (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin,news.misc
Subject: Re: Messages with >80-character lines
Message-ID: <835@quacky.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 25-Oct-87 10:48:29 EST
Article-I.D.: quacky.835
Posted: Sun Oct 25 10:48:29 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 27-Oct-87 04:38:16 EST
References: <767@quacky.UUCP> <696@unisoft.UUCP> <37e7ff5a.b8ab@apollo.uucp> <1453@haddock.ISC.COM> <989@infinet.UUCP>
Reply-To: dce@quacky.UUCP (David Elliott)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 31
Xref: mnetor news.software.b:909 news.admin:1257 news.misc:1066

I'm really glad to see that my question has sparked so much thought
and discussion.

With C news in it's Alpha stage, it might be nice to have some kind
of interim solution. For example, if the new news posting mechanism
(still inews?) could look at the message and if it finds any long
lines (where "long" can be arbitrarily set to 80 characters for now),
it prints the message:

	Warning: This article contains lines longer than 80 characters,
	         making it difficult for some people to read. The
		 articles has been sent, but you should refrain from
		 doing this in the future.

This may be better to do in the news posting front ends (postnews,
Pnews, etc.), which could allow users to edit the article again to
remedy the situation, but this is more work to implement.

Another idea might be to have some sites (backbones) scan articles
for long lines, and send mail to the poster with a message similar 
to the warning above.

Yet another idea might be to add a Max-Line-Length: header field,
generated by inews for articles with lines longer than 80 (again,
chosen arbitrarily, and I would even suggest 40 in this case).
This field could be used by news software to reformat articles if
the user wishes, or in the rn KILL file to junk such messages (as
I said, if it looks too hard to read, I tend to toss it).

-- 
David Elliott		dce@mips.com  or  {ames,decwrl,prls}!mips!dce