Clue about Usenet [Win32 Kernel]

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From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on 12 Feb 2010 22:10

>
>
> Guys, why don't you go and argue these fine points of the past
> somewhere else.
>
If you look you'll find that some of us have been trying to do exactly
that right from the start. Every single message posted so far by me has
had followups set to an appropriate newsgroup, to move the thread
somewhere appropriate, per good Usenet etiquette of decades-long
standing. Not only have M. Santos and M. "Ant" been manually overriding
that in their newsreaders each and every time and posted the thread back
here where it doesn't belong, they've even been arguing about that too.
It does seem, even though I've not known M. Santos to troll in the past
and so was on that basis unwilling to believe it here, as though xe
really is just trolling, at this point. The various tell-tale marks are
now starting to appear (random caps-lock, shriek punctuation, ad
hominems, projection, intentional mis-spellings; we all know the
drill). So in line with my oft-stated policy on not feeding trolls ... (-:

From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on 12 Feb 2010 22:08

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
<title></title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<blockquote cite="mid:u%23BZKXCrKHA.4284(a)TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl"
type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
That talks about character sets, not markup language. 

</blockquote>
No, it talks about parochialism, and the myth that there's some
common 7-bit message format that Usenet is restricted to —  the myth
that there even is such a thing as plain text.  (<a
href="http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html">There is</a> <a
href="http://weblog.delacour.net./archives/2003/10/there_aint_no_such_thing_as_plain_text.php">no
such</a> <a href="http://codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000178.html">thing
as</a> <a href="http://diveintopython3.org./strings.html">plain text</a>.) 
If
you don't understand this, then you haven't read it properly, and
haven't fully appreciated the issues that it involves. 
</blockquote>
Exactly. Character encodings, not HTML. 

</blockquote>
As I said, because you still think that, you don't understand this
and clearly haven't appreciated the issues that it involves.  Go and
read the history.  You haven't yet learned from it. 

<blockquote cite="mid:u%23BZKXCrKHA.4284(a)TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl"
type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
Go and learn about the reasons that led to the very
invention of MIME in the first place.
</blockquote>
You're not posting anything that requires MIME. Hyperlinks
and emphasis marks are conventionally done in other ways on netnews -
e.g. forward slashes to denote italics. 

</blockquote>
If you think that, you haven't experienced enough to know that <a
href="http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/mail-url-style.html">those
methods don't work</a>. (There's something that requires MIME right
there.  There were similar somethings in the previous message.  The
fact that you had to take them out because trying to represent them in <code>text/plain</code>
didn't work in your reply should have been a big clue here.)  As I
said, go and read the history.  There are reasons that people invented
MIME and the various <code>text/*</code> bodypart formats in the first
place. Indeed, go and look at the URL in M. Santos' recent message, and
see how it has been damaged and split on the very WWW site
that it points to.  These methods don't work in practice, and when
you've seen as many broken URLs posted in the way that you want to post
them, and all of the inevitable "What was that URL supposed to be?"
discussions that ensue, as I have, you'll come to more fully understand
the reasons that people started inventing MIME and suchlike in the
1990s, after long experience, even by that point, that your idea
of how the world should work simply doesn't work in practice.  The
world learned from hard and long experience.  

You can learn from this experience, too.  Go and ask people who used
discussion forums in the late 1980s and the 1990s how often URL
breakage, "emphasis" marks that don't actually emphasize, and other
similar things proved to not work in practice; and how often "Oh, you
mean I wasn't supposed to copy the slashes and asterisks too?", "I
couldn't compile that code; the compiler thinks the greater than sign
is a syntax error.", "I copied and pasted that URL but it didn't
work.", "It was all on one line when I sent it.", "It didn't look like
that in the original message that you quoted.", "Your editor must be
broken; I actually wrote 'ä'." and other such conversations came up. 
(There's a reason that there's a Frequently Given Answer, you know. 
It's one of many that were frequently given.)  The world
learned better from experience two decades ago.  Learn the
lessons from history; don't make the same errors all over
again.  Your received wisdom dogma is wrong, doesn't reflect
Usenet as it ever was, doesn't reflect Usenet as it is, ignores what
people really do in practice and have done for a long time at this
point, and doesn't work. 

People invented these mechanisms to solve these common problems. 
It's foolishness not to use them and thereby perpetuate the problems,
decades after the fact.  It's foolish thinking that Chip Salzenberg,
Gene Spafford, and others were explaining to be a novice error, founded
in an parochial and incorrect view of Usenet, more than 20 years ago. 
The reality being studiously ignored by such thinking, moreover, is
that nowadays most people do in fact use the mechanisms and
have long since waved goodbye to the perennial problems of decades
ago.  This even, nowadays, in irony that only serves to highlight
further the sheer muddleheadedness underpinning the notion, includes
most of the people who still post the same at least
two-and-a-half-decades-old canard from the "What is Usenet?" FAQ. 

<blockquote cite="mid:u%23BZKXCrKHA.4284(a)TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl"
type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
The <code>References:</code> header is the
cite. It
always has been, since at least 1983 (the date of RFC 850).  As I said,
for advanced-level knowledge, read
the Usefor discussions of this subject, by the likes of <span
class="Apple-style-span"
style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; font-size: medium;">Russ
Allbery
and
others, in the late 1990s.  Learn from what you are pointed to, and
from history.
</blockquote>
Which is not the same as a good attribution (for
readability of an article) of who said what in quotes. Read
"attribution" instead of "cite" in my quoted text above. 

</blockquote>
I've pointed you in the direction of the wise words of Russ Allbery
and others in the Usefor working group on this subject twice, now.  For
a third time: Go and read them and learn.  You'll discover that people
who know a thing or two about netnews think that it is precisely the
same, and that whatever name you choose to call it it still serves no
purpose beyond what since 1983 has already been a standard part of the
message format.  People wanted to formalize attribution lines.  People
with Clue pointed out that the message format already included
something better and always had done.  Go and read, and learn.  

You'll learn, for starters, that the people whom you might think
would have agreed with you would have berated you for not actually
getting attribution lines right.  There's yet more irony here.  You're
actually using a "short" attribution form where pieces had already
been taken out for being pointless filler.  The whole thing
is pointless filler, you'll find.  Put the old brainbox in gear and
actually think the thing through.  Here are some hints:  What would it
be telling the world to say that "'Ant' wrote:" something?  How many
people in the world are nicknamed "Ant"?  Indeed, <a
href="http://names.whitepages.com./Hector/Santos">how many people</a> <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Santos">are named</a> "<a
href="http://hectorsantos.com./">Hector Santos</a>"? 

<blockquote cite="mid:u%23BZKXCrKHA.4284(a)TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl"
type="cite">
[rude redirection outside the Microsoft server ignored
again] 

</blockquote>
You really need to read about and learn the good Usenet etiquette of
posting to the right newsgroups for the topic.  (Indeed, you really
need to read about how Usenet works too and learn that there's more
than one node in the world, and that nodes are not newsgroups.)  It's
what you are doing that's rude to other people, here.  Notice
what M. Grigoriev said?  Xe is one of the people you are being rude to,
over and over.  Do the polite thing for once, and stop manually
overriding followups and explicitly posting the thread back into a
programming newsgroup every time.
</body>
</html>

From: Hector Santos on 12 Feb 2010 23:04

FINE-NALY! HE STOP SPITTING OUT HTML MAIL!! YOB ACCOMPLISHED!

Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote:

>>
>>
>> Guys, why don't you go and argue these fine points of the past
>> somewhere else.
>>
> If you look you'll find that some of us have been trying to do exactly
> that right from the start. Every single message posted so far by me has
> had followups set to an appropriate newsgroup, to move the thread
> somewhere appropriate, per good Usenet etiquette of decades-long
> standing. Not only have M. Santos and M. "Ant" been manually overriding
> that in their newsreaders each and every time and posted the thread back
> here where it doesn't belong, they've even been arguing about that too.
> It does seem, even though I've not known M. Santos to troll in the past
> and so was on that basis unwilling to believe it here, as though xe
> really is just trolling, at this point. The various tell-tale marks are
> now starting to appear (random caps-lock, shriek punctuation, ad
> hominems, projection, intentional mis-spellings; we all know the
> drill). So in line with my oft-stated policy on not feeding trolls ... (-:
>

--
HLS

From: Ant on 13 Feb 2010 15:54

Jonathan de Boyne Pollard" wrote:

> Notice what M. Grigoriev said?

I've made my points and so have you, albeit in a rather patronising
and pompous manner. I'll leave with a couple of links that support my
position. Readers can make up their own minds.

http://www.imc.org/ietf-usefor/1999/Mar/0315.html
| If you want to argue against HTML on Usenet, hey, I'm with you there.
| ...
| Russ Allbery

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-usefor-useage
| The followup agent SHOULD also precede the quoted content by an
| "attribution line"

From: Hector Santos on 13 Feb 2010 17:35

Ant wrote:

> Jonathan de Boyne Pollard" wrote:
>
>> Notice what M. Grigoriev said?
>
> I've made my points and so have you, albeit in a rather patronising
> and pompous manner. I'll leave with a couple of links that support my
> position. Readers can make up their own minds.
>
> http://www.imc.org/ietf-usefor/1999/Mar/0315.html
> | If you want to argue against HTML on Usenet, hey, I'm with you there.
> | ...
> | Russ Allbery
>
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-usefor-useage
> | The followup agent SHOULD also precede the quoted content by an
> | "attribution line"
>
>

Speaking of one of the early developers of mail system products:

What is forgotten here is the time frame where HTML was STILL not
widely accepted in the MAIL market, and I'm not just talking RFC 822,
UUCICO, RFC 821, but also Fidonet and others, but primarily Internet
and Fidonet.

By the mid 90s, if you were not in academia or have access to an ISP
using products such as our Wildcat! Gateway software among many
others, the common user didn't have access to email or news. There
were all kinds of ways that was available to give users access to
email and news.

You have to also consider the forms of "group ware" that existed and
how they all being mixed up today!

All in all, the bottom line is the "VIEWER" and by the mid 90s, not
everyone was using BROWSER base viewing. Firefox didn't exist,
certainly tbird, and OE doesn't make its introduction yet, the
GOO-KIDS were still in high school! Microsoft newsgroups didn't
exist. Many were still using Compuserve! News gating was still a
rare thing. You had console based reading, you had proprietary
readers, offline mail systems (our personal claim to fame) was still
popular but on a death spiral as online connectivity was becoming more
feasible.

Today, you have something that can be outline like this:

http://www.winserver.com/public/vimg.wct?src=wcrpcnet7.png

where you have a heterogeneous world of multi-device systems. You
have different clients out there and to assume one form of mail is
going to be acceptable, well, thats would be a mistake.

That is why you have mixed MIME formats that most devices support.

What Jonathan needed to understand, there was nothing wrong with his
authorship with mark up languages, but that he will limit his audience
by fixing the OUTPUT in one form. That is all that I am personally
debating here beside the fact he wants to be a moderator and doesn't
have the power to do so in the usenet or private newsgroup arena, not
like his fidonet days where he had the power to cut you off if you
argued with him. Using a redirection into potential la-la land is a
way to get the last word. Works with most layman, but with people who
knows what he is doing.

--
HLS

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