Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!lts!amanda From: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: yet another suggested change for newsreaders Message-ID: <1076@lts.UUCP> Date: 14 Mar 89 16:22:38 GMT References: <2813776185@stearns.steinmetz.ge.com> <204@shadooby.cc.umich.edu> Reply-To: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Reston, VA Lines: 34 Something that I have been thinking about recently is some kind of extended article format. Given news readers & posters on workstations and other beasties with nice displays that can display multiple fonts & so on, it would be nice to start taking advantage of them. The only problem is that most people still read news on (relatively) dumb terminals, so we can't just use Content-Type: and RTF/TeX/PostScript/whatever. What I was thinking of is ugly, but so far seems workable. Start by having a Content-Type: field (or X-Content-Type:) that serves as a flag to the newsreader that the article is in the new format. The format itself is similar in spirit to the way rn (or "more") interprets line printer stuff (such as _^Hx to specify an underlined 'x'): if you just print out or view the file, it should look OK. For example: _^Hx italicized or underlined 'x' x^Hx boldface 'x' `` open double quotes '' close double quotes blank line paragraph boundary > if at start of all lines in a paragraph, quoted text ^H (space-backspace) display rest of line verbatim etc... This is just an idea, but I was wondering if anyone else thought that something like this would be useful or reasonable. It's ugly, but it is backward-compatible (funny how those two things often go together... :-)). Comments? -- Amanda Walker, InterCon Systems Corporation amanda@lts.UUCP / ...!uunet!lts!amanda / 703.435.8170 -- C combines the flexibility of assembler with the power of assembler.