Xref: utzoo comp.sources.d:3232 news.groups:6925 news.software.b:1860 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!stl!dww From: dww@stl.stc.co.uk (David Wright) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,news.groups,news.software.b Subject: Re: comp.datasets Call For Discussion Message-ID: <950@acer.stl.stc.co.uk> Date: 18 Jan 89 21:30:29 GMT References: <1249@fig.bbn.com> <1280@vsi1.UUCP> <151@cjsa.WA.COM> <394@ispi.UUCP> <4@netsys1.netsys.COM> <6201@hoptoad.uucp> <10875@s.ms.uky.edu> <1947@qiclab.UUCP> Reply-To: "David Wright" Organization: STL,Harlow,UK. Lines: 32 In article <1947@qiclab.UUCP> leonard@qiclab.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) writes: #In article <10875@s.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) writes: ##Some of us have a dream of making a "WorldNet" .. a world-wide discussion I thought that's what we had now? Of course not fully world-wide yet, the Soviet block and most of Africa and S. America is missing, but hopefully they will come in due time (maybe soon for the first). #Once you add 8-bit support, the only problem with binary data would be #line length and indicating end-of-file. No it wouldn't. We can ship 8-bit data now, but remember that news articles GET DISPLAYED. If we had a new version of news reader that could, ODA-like, distinguish different object types and know which to display (the note saying what this binary data was) and which to save in a file but NOT push onto the screen, all might be well. But we don't, and even if you have just written one, it will be a long time before must of us are running it. Surely most people on the net have experienced accidentally displaying a binary file (e.g. an executable binary)? For most terminals, the result is a terminal in some odd mode, which has to be reset in order to display the basic (or even extended :-)) character set. If binary data is sent as a news article, it ought to be coded in some way that won't do this - e.g. the present btoa or encode schemes, or some new improved one if you like. 8 bit characer sets are no going to solve this problem either, they are still going to include control characters and control sequences that do strange things, probably more than now (e.g. my VT330 gets very upset if I forget to put it in 7-bit VT100 mode before connecting over an X.25 link that sets character parity in the 8th bit - in 8-bit mode those (7 bit + parity) characters mean something, often something very odd). -- Regards, "Are you sure YOUR password won't appear in RTM's next list?" David Wright STL, London Road, Harlow, Essex CM17 9NA, UK dww@stl.stc.co.uk ...uunet!mcvax!ukc!stl!dww PSI%234237100122::DWW