• Usenet Markup

    From Jason Evans@21:1/5 to All on Fri Nov 12 07:30:48 2021
    Some of you may have seen the HTML spammer in news.admin.misc and a few
    other places. Someone else recently asked on Reddit why HTML isn't used
    more on Usenet. I think the basic answer is because so many people still
    use terminal-based newsreaders like SLRN and NN and HTML just makes
    everything harder to read.

    I think there could be a middle ground. Take something like gemtext which
    is a very limited subset of the Markdown markup language. Gemtext has
    only 5 different operations that are used for formatting:

    Links:
    https://blog.theuse.net My Blog

    Headings:
    # Heading
    ## Sub-heading
    ### Sub-sub-heading

    Lists:
    * Item 1
    * Item 2
    * Item 3

    Blockquotes:
    That's what she said

    Preformatted text/Source code:
    ```
    #!/bin/bash

    echo "this is a bash script"
    ```

    Right now there are no newsreaders that handle this kind of markup but if
    there were, users who do not use that newsreader would not be distracted
    by it being in an article that they were reading because they don't
    interfere with normal reading the way HTML interferes.

    Just throwing this out there for discussion.

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Jason Evans on Fri Nov 12 11:40:32 2021
    On 11/12/21 12:30 AM, Jason Evans wrote:
    Some of you may have seen the HTML spammer in news.admin.misc and a few
    other places. Someone else recently asked on Reddit why HTML isn't used
    more on Usenet.

    In a word, "convention".

    I think the basic answer is because so many people still use
    terminal-based newsreaders like SLRN and NN and HTML just makes
    everything harder to read.

    Maybe, maybe not.

    I think there could be a middle ground. Take something like gemtext which
    is a very limited subset of the Markdown markup language.

    gemtext seems like it might be fairly innocuous, much like
    format=flowed. Though I suspect that gemtext's update would be lower
    than format=flowed's uptake.

    Right now there are no newsreaders that handle this kind of markup but if there were, users who do not use that newsreader would not be distracted
    by it being in an article that they were reading because they don't
    interfere with normal reading the way HTML interferes.

    Valid point.

    Just throwing this out there for discussion.

    I think introducing another form of markup seems like it's only going to
    muddy the water even more.

    The wonderful thing about standards is that we have so many to pick
    from. A la. xkce 927 -- Standards

    https://xkcd.com/927/



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Fri Nov 12 20:35:11 2021
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
    On 11/12/21 12:30 AM, Jason Evans wrote:

    Some of you may have seen the HTML spammer in news.admin.misc and a few >>other places. Someone else recently asked on Reddit why HTML isn't used >>more on Usenet.

    In a word, "convention".

    I think the basic answer is because so many people still use
    terminal-based newsreaders like SLRN and NN and HTML just makes
    everything harder to read.

    Maybe, maybe not.

    I think there could be a middle ground. Take something like gemtext which >>is a very limited subset of the Markdown markup language.

    gemtext seems like it might be fairly innocuous, much like
    format=flowed. Though I suspect that gemtext's update would be lower
    than format=flowed's uptake.

    And yet format=flowed is badly implemented on any number of Mail and
    News clients.

    Whether gemtext is innocuous depends on successful implementation in
    clients.

    I like plain text ASCII. It's universally readable.

    Right now there are no newsreaders that handle this kind of markup but if >>there were, users who do not use that newsreader would not be distracted
    by it being in an article that they were reading because they don't >>interfere with normal reading the way HTML interferes.

    Valid point.

    Just throwing this out there for discussion.

    I think introducing another form of markup seems like it's only going to >muddy the water even more.

    The wonderful thing about standards is that we have so many to pick
    from. A la. xkce 927 -- Standards

    https://xkcd.com/927/

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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net on Sat Nov 13 01:32:17 2021
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
    On 11/12/21 1:35 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    And yet format=flowed is badly implemented on any number of Mail and
    News clients.

    I've been using format=flowed for close to 20 years without any problems.

    I think that's wonderful. I've attempted to use it in different clients.
    Almost none can handle it in followup. The quotes ended up nonstandard.

    Bugs exist in almost all computer programs. Implementations of >format=flowed, or default configurations therefor, are subject to
    similar bugs.

    Ok. That's a tautology.

    Whether gemtext is innocuous depends on successful implementation
    in clients.

    I like plain text ASCII. It's universally readable.

    format=flowed *is* /plain/ /text/.

    What does that have to do with my comment about ASCII? It's not
    character set dependent.

    I've seen clients produce long lines in format=flowed, which makes it
    NOT universally readable if it won't output lines of 78 characters or
    less. There's no reason to output text not intended to be displayed on
    a screen width of 80 characters as it's designed to treat each paragraph
    as one long line and reformat on the fly based on screen width.

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Fri Nov 12 21:13:07 2021
    On 11/12/21 6:32 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
    I think that's wonderful. I've attempted to use it in different clients. Almost none can handle it in followup. The quotes ended up nonstandard.

    I've not noticed a problem in follow up replies vs new messages per se.
    I think the problem has to do with the source material, be it newly
    typed text or copy that's being replied to.

    For instance, your comment above is not formatted per format=flowed
    standards. I've slightly altered a copy below such that it is formatted
    per format=flowed. I've also increased the quote depth.

    I think that's wonderful. I've attempted to use it in different clients.
    Almost none can handle it in followup. The quotes ended up nonstandard.

    Here's another copy of it that has been completely reformatted the way
    that I usually do things. Plus yet another increase in quote depth.

    I think that's wonderful. I've attempted to use it in different
    clients. Almost none can handle it in followup. The quotes ended
    up nonstandard.

    :-)

    What does that have to do with my comment about ASCII? It's not
    character set dependent.

    Sorry, I think of plain text as being ASCII. Or more precisely plain
    text is a subset of ASCII.

    I've seen clients produce long lines in format=flowed, which makes it
    NOT universally readable if it won't output lines of 78 characters or
    less.

    That statement tells me without a doubt that those long lines (as viewed
    in the message source) are NOT format=flowed.

    It sounds like you are instead talking about the simply really long /
    unwrapped lines of text. Which is something that I consider to be an abomination.

    There's no reason to output text not intended to be displayed on a
    screen width of 80 characters as it's designed to treat each paragraph
    as one long line and reformat on the fly based on screen width.

    Why is there any reason to artificially limit /display/ of text to 80
    -- or pick the number you prefer -- characters?

    I believe that format=flowed is a wonderful happy medium. It allows format=flowed enabled readers to re-wrap the text to the window width
    for /display/ while the underlying source is fixed width. Thus
    format=flowed will respect those that want the text to be re-wrapped
    /and/ those that want text to be < 80 characters per line.

    Format=flowed works by doing two things:

    1) Adding a header indicating that format=flowed is being used.
    2) Output lines of text up to but not exceeding a fixed width. That
    fixed width is usually set to 72 through 76 characters.

    The output lines that are supposed to be continued end with a space.

    The existence of the format=flowed header means that any line that ends
    with a space is supposed to have the next line appended to it.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From =?UTF-8?Q?Julien_=c3=89LIE?=@21:1/5 to All on Sat Nov 13 09:47:54 2021
    Hi Adam,

    I like plain text ASCII. It's universally readable.

    Just responding to say I like UTF-8 better :-)

    P.-S.: I think you now decode well my messages :-)

    --
    Julien ÉLIE

    « Dès que le silence se fait, les gens le meublent. » (Raymond Devos)

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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Sat Nov 13 12:42:42 2021
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
    On 11/12/21 6:32 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    I think that's wonderful. I've attempted to use it in different clients. >>Almost none can handle it in followup. The quotes ended up nonstandard.

    I've not noticed a problem in follow up replies vs new messages per se.
    I think the problem has to do with the source material, be it newly
    typed text or copy that's being replied to.

    The problem in my experience has not been the source material. With a
    client that poorly implements it, I've observed that the quote of
    material that began as flowed text is no longer flowed text.

    . . .

    What does that have to do with my comment about ASCII? It's not
    character set dependent.

    Sorry, I think of plain text as being ASCII. Or more precisely plain
    text is a subset of ASCII.

    I'm not going to dispute that plain text using the Latin alphabet in a
    language other that English with accented characters is plain text.
    However, I do not recognize as plain text substituting open and close
    single and double quotes in punctuation or em and en dashes for which
    there are perfectly good ASCII punctuation marks. I have yet to see one
    of these "smart quote" implementations that distinguish between single
    close quote, apostrophe, and acute accent. All three may be represented
    by the same glyph but they have separate character codes in UTF.

    I've seen clients produce long lines in format=flowed, which makes it
    NOT universally readable if it won't output lines of 78 characters or
    less.

    That statement tells me without a doubt that those long lines (as viewed
    in the message source) are NOT format=flowed.

    format=flowed is not line length dependent, for the entire paragraph may
    be one long line or a series of lines of widely varying length, and
    still display as intended within the viewport.

    I looked at RFC 3676. The recommendation not to exceed 78 characters is
    a SHOULD, not a MUST.

    It sounds like you are instead talking about the simply really long / >unwrapped lines of text. Which is something that I consider to be an >abomination.

    No, I'm not. I'm talking about those who use a variable-width
    character set instead of a fixed-width character set when composing News
    and Mail. The line length is then set by their viewport, ignoring the
    needs of those of us who continue to expect output for an 80 character
    width terminal or emulation.

    . . .

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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to All on Sat Nov 13 13:46:11 2021
    Julien à LIE <iulius@nom-de-mon-site.com.invalid> wrote:

    I am aware that you spell your last name with Latin Capital E With Acute Accent. Your encoded word is =c3=80. I'm using the vim text editor to edit
    this followup. I see Latin Capital A with Tilde.

    Hi Adam,

    I like plain text ASCII. It's universally readable.

    Just responding to say I like UTF-8 better :-)

    P.-S.: I think you now decode well my messages :-)

    No. It's never displayed on my UTF-8 terminal emulations as you intended.
    On the Linux Mint laptop I'm using Xfce Terminal Emulator.

    --
    Julien ÉLIE

    I see Latin Capital A with Tilde, then <89> which is an undecoded display.

    « Dès que le silence se fait, les gens le meublent. » (Raymond Devos)

    Here I see several non-printing characters and various accented letters
    not displaying as you intended.

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Sat Nov 13 10:10:08 2021
    On 11/13/21 5:42 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
    The problem in my experience has not been the source material. With
    a client that poorly implements it, I've observed that the quote of
    material that began as flowed text is no longer flowed text.

    Ah.

    I too have seen many email / news clients not properly handle quoting of previously format=flowed text.

    To me, that quote text is /new/ text that happens to resemble the
    original format=flowed text. Somewhat like a photo copy of a photo copy.

    You are referring to an area where there are far more bugs. An area
    where I have taken to manually reformatting text that go into articles
    that I reply to. I have a script that I use to reformat quoted text.

    Use of format=flowed is important enough to me that I take time to reformat=flowed (reflow?) text in messages that I reply to.

    I'm not going to dispute that plain text using the Latin alphabet in
    a language other that English with accented characters is plain text. However, I do not recognize as plain text substituting open and close
    single and double quotes in punctuation or em and en dashes for which
    there are perfectly good ASCII punctuation marks. I have yet to see one
    of these "smart quote" implementations that distinguish between single
    close quote, apostrophe, and acute accent. All three may be represented
    by the same glyph but they have separate character codes in UTF.

    That statement didn't go where I thought it was going to go. I will say
    that I may have simplified "plain text" to some extent. But I didn't
    think this thread was going far enough into the weeds about that. I'll
    mostly bow out of that discussion.

    Mostly as in there is a difference in meaning of a dash (a.k.a. hyphen),
    an en-dash, and an em-dash. Admittedly they are lost on many people.

    I think a comparison can be made to an "o", "O", and "0". As there was
    a time when people had to be taught to use the proper letter in the
    proper context, particularly when interacting with computers.

    1-5 (dash / hyphen) vs 1–5 (en-dash) Am I subtracting 5 from 1 or am I saying 1 through 5? The dash vs en-dash makes a difference.

    <Title> — <subtitle> An em-dash is a form of separator / pause.

    There are differences between the "-" (dash / hyphen), "–" (en-dash),
    and "—" (em-dash). Some may think that the differences are an
    unnecessary nuance.

    format=flowed is not line length dependent, for the entire paragraph
    may be one long line or a series of lines of widely varying length,
    and still display as intended within the viewport.

    Which is one of the reasons that I like format=flowed as much as I do.

    I looked at RFC 3676. The recommendation not to exceed 78 characters
    is a SHOULD, not a MUST.

    Yep.

    No, I'm not. I'm talking about those who use a variable-width character
    set instead of a fixed-width character set when composing News and
    Mail. The line length is then set by their viewport, ignoring the
    needs of those of us who continue to expect output for an 80 character
    width terminal or emulation.

    The font face should not make a difference. Variable vs fixed width
    text should support format=flowed perfectly fine.

    The fact that you are running into a hard line length — other than
    someone using the wrong value close to 78 — tells me that you are
    dealing with something that's not implementing format=flowed properly.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Sat Nov 13 10:14:54 2021
    On 11/13/21 6:46 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
    No. It's never displayed on my UTF-8 terminal emulations as you
    intended. On the Linux Mint laptop I'm using Xfce Terminal Emulator.

    Sounds to me like you need to get a better terminal emulator.

    XTerm displays it just fine and looks identical to what Thunderbird
    displays.

    I see Latin Capital A with Tilde, then <89> which is an undecoded
    display.

    Or perhaps your MUA / editor needs some tweaking.

    I'm able to see Julien's text just fine inside of vim in XTerm.

    Here I see several non-printing characters and various accented
    letters not displaying as you intended.

    Sounds to me like you're seeing the message source, not a rendered
    message. Hence the MUA comment.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Sat Nov 13 10:17:08 2021
    On 11/13/21 10:14 AM, Grant Taylor wrote:
    Sounds to me like you need to get a better terminal emulator.
    ...
    Or perhaps your MUA / editor needs some tweaking.
    ...
    Sounds to me like you're seeing the message source, not a rendered
    message.  Hence the MUA comment.

    You are obviously free to use whatever software / hardware that you want
    to use.

    But I implore you to understand where the limitation is. Maybe it's a configuration issue of what you're using. Maybe it's a lack of capability.

    Use what you want to, but understand what and how your choice impacts
    what you do.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Sat Nov 13 18:25:32 2021
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
    On 11/13/21 5:42 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    format=flowed is not line length dependent, for the entire paragraph
    may be one long line or a series of lines of widely varying length,
    and still display as intended within the viewport.

    Which is one of the reasons that I like format=flowed as much as I do.

    I looked at RFC 3676. The recommendation not to exceed 78 characters
    is a SHOULD, not a MUST.

    Yep.

    No, I'm not. I'm talking about those who use a variable-width character
    set instead of a fixed-width character set when composing News and
    Mail. The line length is then set by their viewport, ignoring the
    needs of those of us who continue to expect output for an 80 character >>width terminal or emulation.

    The font face should not make a difference.

    Of course not, but I didn't write the client to flout conventional line
    length.

    Variable vs fixed width text should support format=flowed perfectly fine.

    The fact that you are running into a hard line length — other than
    someone using the wrong value close to 78 — tells me that you are
    dealing with something that's not implementing format=flowed properly.

    I'm disagreeing with you on that. Outputting conventional line length is
    a separate issue from outputting standard flowed text.

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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Sat Nov 13 18:32:24 2021
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
    On 11/13/21 6:46 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    No. It's never displayed on my UTF-8 terminal emulations as you
    intended. On the Linux Mint laptop I'm using Xfce Terminal Emulator.

    Sounds to me like you need to get a better terminal emulator.

    It may not be the terminal emulator. I have a similar problem with
    Julien's articles on PuTTY on a Windows 8.1 desktop.

    My guess is it's something in the LOCALE setting of the remote terminal
    but I have no idea what it could be since both the terminal and the two emulations are set to UTF-8.

    Or perhaps your MUA / editor needs some tweaking.

    Then you'll have to clue me in. As far as I'm aware, vim doesn't touch
    this stuff and can't override the terminal emulation.

    Here I see several non-printing characters and various accented
    letters not displaying as you intended.

    Sounds to me like you're seeing the message source, not a rendered
    message. Hence the MUA comment.

    When there's an incompatibility, non-printing characters become visible.
    I sometimes do that deliberately to make sure I've eliminated them when
    I intend to send plain text.

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Sat Nov 13 17:41:41 2021
    On 11/13/21 11:25 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
    I'm disagreeing with you on that. Outputting conventional line length
    is a separate issue from outputting standard flowed text.

    Please provide an example of where you are seeing a problem.

    I'm still not tracking where the problem would relate to format=flowed.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Sat Nov 13 17:43:37 2021
    On 11/13/21 11:32 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
    My guess is it's something in the LOCALE setting of the remote terminal
    but I have no idea what it could be since both the terminal and the
    two emulations are set to UTF-8.

    Maybe.

    Then you'll have to clue me in. As far as I'm aware, vim doesn't
    touch this stuff and can't override the terminal emulation.

    I was thinking that the MUA might not be processing / decoding things
    correctly and thus displaying them incorrectly.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Sun Nov 14 01:35:31 2021
    Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
    On 11/13/21 11:25 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    I'm disagreeing with you on that. Outputting conventional line length
    is a separate issue from outputting standard flowed text.

    Please provide an example of where you are seeing a problem.

    I'm still not tracking where the problem would relate to format=flowed.

    That would be my point. It's an unrelated issue.

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  • From =?UTF-8?Q?Julien_=c3=89LIE?=@21:1/5 to All on Fri Nov 19 19:42:14 2021
    Hi Adam,

    It may not be the terminal emulator. I have a similar problem with
    Julien's articles on PuTTY on a Windows 8.1 desktop.

    My guess is it's something in the LOCALE setting of the remote terminal
    but I have no idea what it could be since both the terminal and the two emulations are set to UTF-8.

    Do you have "UTF-8" as remote character set in the Window > Translation parameter of PuTTY?

    Which locale do you use on the remote terminal?
    export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
    export LANG=en_US.utf8
    don't do the trick?

    --
    Julien ÉLIE

    « – Depuis quelque temps, Zérozérosix n'attire plus les mouches !
    – Espérons qu'il ne nous attirera pas d'ennuis ! » (Astérix)

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  • From Donkey Button@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Sat Nov 20 11:34:35 2021
    On 11/12/21 2:35 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    [...]

    I like plain text ASCII. It's universally readable.

    I agree. I love the old vanilla. That said, English is not the only
    language in use. Also: math.

    We are at a point where all terminals and graphical clients should be
    UTF-8 compliant, and attaching postscript-like font blobs and simple
    formatting instructions could be part of the standard. With HTML we
    attach CSS/JS. A simpler scheme than in HTML allows for multiple
    languages. It would also allow for intricate mathematical notation.

    Of course I believe default should be ASCII and nothing should be
    attached that doesn't need to be. I also think that any kind of attached resource should always be at the very bottom of the text file, never at
    the top. Inline markup should be numerical indexes instead of style
    tags, to prevent a lot of visual clutter. The human eye gets accustomed
    to numbers in parenthesis quickly and soon just tunes them out.

    For instance one might have some UTF-8 math operators or Greek glyphs
    with a enclosed font in postscript/base64 format. The postscript code
    for the glyphs should be at the end of the file with a numerical index
    like this:

    (31) RG9ua2V5IEJ1dHRvbiBydWxlcyB0aGUgSW50ZXJuZXQK
    (32) cG9zdHNjcmlwdCBnbHlwaHMgYXQgZW5kIG9mIGZpbGUK
    (33) ZmFrZSBwb3N0c2NyaXB0IGdseXBoIGluZGV4IGNvZGUK

    And in the text body it would be inserted like this:

    (32:) unicode symbols or entity codes go here (:32)
    (33:) Spo9AmpYwPrv220TwtNDQm61lv81m/zJ (:33)

    Index 33 would theoretically be UTF-8, but I substituted base64 just for
    the example.

    Readers should hide the index tags by default. Readers that can't render
    them should allow display of the tags and code or hiding all tagged code.

    Index tags can be used for any kind of formatting. However the format instructions should not be part of the index tags. Rather the
    instructions should reside at the footer of the document and be
    referenced by a numerical tag. This also has the side effect of clear
    and unambiguous semantic meaning without boilerplate.

    In this way plain text would just render as plain text without any need
    for highly-distracting markup or instruction, and formatted text and
    font resources would not obstruct any plain text in the document.

    Command-line browsers and readers like lynx and slrn would only need a
    few lines of code to detect and adapt the scheme for modern terminals
    that are UTF-8 compliant.

    --
    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
    Hash: SHA256

    Donkey Button

    (29) Spo9AmpYwPrv220TwtNDQm61lv81m/zJ
    (30) RG9ua2V5IEJ1dHRvbiBpcyBqdXN0IEFTQ0lJIHRleHQK
    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

    iIoEARYIADIWIQTVsPVXpYZunw9X5fAPDrQ1oja5vAUCYZkwjhQcZG9ua2V5QGJ1 dHRvbi5hc2NpaQAKCRAPDrQ1oja5vME7AP4svyYiU8C0ppKJSUYGjSomOqBV3hMZ UzfhIn6di1Y9bAEAlhQ9yX/cnPxYbAT7s6Obon5TFOYZc5T10hTzIieRowg=
    =P7T5
    -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Donkey Button on Sat Nov 20 21:32:48 2021
    Donkey Button <donkey@button.ascii> wrote:
    On 11/12/21 2:35 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    [...]

    I like plain text ASCII. It's universally readable.

    I agree. I love the old vanilla. That said, English is not the only
    language in use. Also: math. . . .

    What idiot would post a noncontroversial opinion like this through
    mixmin?

    hi seamus

    fuck off seamus

    bye seamus

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  • From Donkey Button@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Sun Nov 21 05:37:51 2021
    On 11/20/21 3:32 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    What idiot would post a noncontroversial opinion like this through
    mixmin?

    *plonk*

    The name-calling and [snipped] profanity is unhinged and pubescent
    behavior. It seems like this person was asking for his address to
    be killfiled. I have granted his subliminal request.

    --
    Donkey Button

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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Donkey Button on Sun Nov 21 18:26:09 2021
    Donkey Button <donkey@button.ascii> wrote:
    On 11/20/21 3:32 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    What idiot would post a noncontroversial opinion like this through
    mixmin?

    *plonk*

    The name-calling and [snipped] profanity is unhinged and pubescent
    behavior. It seems like this person was asking for his address to
    be killfiled. I have granted his subliminal request.

    hi seamus

    fuck off seamus

    bye bye seamus

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  • From Kefra Gotex@21:1/5 to Jason Evans on Mon Nov 7 05:49:09 2022
    On 11/12/21 01:30, Jason Evans wrote:
    Some of you may have seen the HTML spammer in news.admin.misc and a few
    other places. Someone else recently asked on Reddit why HTML isn't used
    more on Usenet. I think the basic answer is because so many people still
    use terminal-based newsreaders like SLRN and NN and HTML just makes everything harder to read.

    I think there could be a middle ground. Take something like gemtext which
    is a very limited subset of the Markdown markup language. Gemtext has
    only 5 different operations that are used for formatting:

    Links:
    https://blog.theuse.net My Blog

    Headings:
    # Heading
    ## Sub-heading
    ### Sub-sub-heading

    Lists:
    * Item 1
    * Item 2
    * Item 3

    Blockquotes:
    That's what she said

    Preformatted text/Source code:
    ```
    #!/bin/bash

    echo "this is a bash script"
    ```

    Right now there are no newsreaders that handle this kind of markup but if there were, users who do not use that newsreader would not be distracted
    by it being in an article that they were reading because they don't
    interfere with normal reading the way HTML interferes.

    Just throwing this out there for discussion.

    I think markdown would be slightly better, since it can syntactically be rendered as HTML, with all styling controlled by the reader rather than
    the author.

    For those addicted to extreme simplicity, a half-dozen markdown rules is
    all they would need to know, which would put it on par with Gemini text.

    A custom NNTP header in each message could indicate the format for
    readers aware of formats. It could be like a !DOCTYPE declartion. For
    example:

    Doctype: html5
    Doctype: xml
    Markup: gemini 1.0
    Markup: markdown
    Markup: commonmark
    Markup: GFM 3.2
    Markup: RST
    Markup: asciidoc
    Markup: bbcode
    Markup: wikimedia

    Readers without markup awareness could just display as is.

    Mime dividers could allow multiple formats to be attached. This would
    allow the client software to choose which format to render. Using a
    proper compression algorithm like 7z or xz would deflate multiple
    markups of the same text very well since they would share most words in
    common. Therefore bandwidth inflation would not really be an issue.

    The big tech shills would want the client to access a remote URI to get
    or validate the doctype or markup declaration, so they can get IPs of Usenetizens. The moment anyone would try to put this poison into the
    protocol, it would be necessary to expose it for its true motivation.
    There is no reason whatsoever for any NNTP client to access any URI to
    validate any formatting declaration. A RFC would need to run ahead of
    this making clear that URI access is prohibited for rendering of any
    format. Look at google API scripts and fonts for an example of how that surveillance operation works in web pages.

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