A note on newsgroup signatures

[Brandon Blackmoor]

That is a ridiculous convention.

You are entitled to your opinion. Nonetheless, your opinion is irrelevant.

Trailing spaces are routinely stripped from lines.

Not unless the software is seriously, grievously, broken.

-- on a line by itself should suffice.

Feel free to go back in time 20 years and suggest it. In the meantime,
the specification is as stated: "-- ".

 

[Joona I Palaste]

Thomas Weidenfeller <[email protected]> scribbled the following

No, it worked for maybe two decades. There is only one widely used
broken "newsreader", who (or more precisely who's programmer's) don't
get it: Outlook Express. This is one of the many reasons why OE is so
much hated by long-time news users.

Well, it's made by Microsoft, and you know how *they* feel about
standards.

 

[Roedy Green]

Why don't you familiarize yourself with the established standards?

I am not saying it is not the established standard. I am saying the
established standard was SILLY, guaranteed to screw up eventually
because of the way so much software automatically trims trailing
blanks from lines. It is further not a visibly obvious standard.

 

[Roedy Green]

I am not saying it is not the established standard. I am saying the
established standard was SILLY, guaranteed to screw up eventually
because of the way so much software automatically trims trailing
blanks from lines. It is further not a visibly obvious standard.

The standard has one saving grace. If the body has trailing spaces
trimmed, the user can't accidentally create the marker.

 

[Rene]

I am not saying it is not the established standard. I am saying the
established standard was SILLY, guaranteed to screw up eventually
because of the way so much software automatically trims trailing
blanks from lines. It is further not a visibly obvious standard.

The signature delimiter is not "-- " its "-- <CR><LF>". That might seem
very pedantic but its not.

Just reply to me and see that your program is NOT treating this as
signature which it would have were the delimiter only "--". (thrice up to
now, already...)

There is a reason why this is so. Just have a look at how MIME attachements
get encoded and to what lengths one has to go to ensure proper delimiting
without mixing up content and delimiter. (Oh and as a nice additional
point, my signature is the default of the NSP I use and it contains many
many many signature delimiters if...)

CU

René

 

[Joona I Palaste]

Rene <[email protected]> scribbled the following

The signature delimiter is not "-- " its "-- <CR><LF>". That might seem
very pedantic but its not.

Are you sure about that <CR><LF>? Not all platforms use that kind of
end-of-line marker, you know. Mine, for example, uses <LF>.

--
/-- Joona Palaste ([email protected]) ------------- Finland --------\
\-- http://www.helsinki.fi/~palaste --------------------- rules! --------/
"Parthenogenetic procreation in humans will result in the founding of a new
religion."
- John Nordberg

 

[Steven J Sobol]

This is the first that I've heard of it. Maybe I didn't pay attention
since I don't use a signature. Thanks for the info.

It's an old, old convention - some software that parses Usenet posts and
e-mail messages does actually look for dash dash space newline.

--
JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, Apple Valley, CA PGP: 0xE3AE35ED
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / (e-mail address removed)
Domain Names, $9.95/yr, 24x7 service: http://DomainNames.JustThe.net/
"someone once called me a sofa, but i didn't feel compelled to rush out and buy
slip covers." -adam brower * Hiroshima '45, Chernobyl '86, Windows 98/2000/2003

 

[Steven J Sobol]

Hi Roeady,

you are absolutelly right on the ridiculous part. But conventions should
not make sense, they should just be known to all.

"Conventions don't need to make sense" is what you probably meant, no?

They always SHOULD make sense.

--
JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, Apple Valley, CA PGP: 0xE3AE35ED
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / (e-mail address removed)
Domain Names, $9.95/yr, 24x7 service: http://DomainNames.JustThe.net/
"someone once called me a sofa, but i didn't feel compelled to rush out and buy
slip covers." -adam brower * Hiroshima '45, Chernobyl '86, Windows 98/2000/2003

 

[Steven J Sobol]

I'm pretty sure netscape (or any older version of mozilla?) composer used to
strip trailing spaces as well, as I changed to another newsreader/writer for
the very reason that I couldn't post proper signature delimiters.

Netscape 4 and earlier were badly broken - at least the browser was, as it
didn't conform as well to HTML standards as IE did (!)

Apparently Composer didn't do all that well with standards either....

--
JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, Apple Valley, CA PGP: 0xE3AE35ED
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / (e-mail address removed)
Domain Names, $9.95/yr, 24x7 service: http://DomainNames.JustThe.net/
"someone once called me a sofa, but i didn't feel compelled to rush out and buy
slip covers." -adam brower * Hiroshima '45, Chernobyl '86, Windows 98/2000/2003

 

[Roedy Green]

Netscape 4 and earlier were badly broken - at least the browser was, as it
didn't conform as well to HTML standards as IE did (!)

IF you make a standard, don't tell anyone, and make it hard to tell
what it is by examining other people's work, you bloody well deserve
to have it violated.

 

[Rene]

Rene <[email protected]> scribbled the following



Are you sure about that <CR><LF>? Not all platforms use that kind of
end-of-line marker, you know. Mine, for example, uses <LF>.

(removed java.help because I don't read it)

Imho at the time it was defined, there was no Windows around and the
message format simply said that line wraps were <CR><LF>. The NNTP
protokoll up to today still uses this as "wire protocol" which among other
things means there are some special cases to consider because
<CR><LF>.<CR><LF> means end of message and if you want to have a dot on a
line by itself, it gets duplicated. Similar things goes for Email because
both basically "inherit" this from RFC 822

It might well be that it was not as verbose as I wrote it above but the
linewrap is certainly part of the deal, ie a "-- " mid-text does not
trigger it but any<linewrap>-- <linewrap> does. This makes sense, because
otherwise you coulnd't actually talk about it, especially not if users opt
to automatically hide the signatures.

Nowadays you need to be ready for some clients not sending <CR><LF> when
you'd expect them to and also accept single \n's for some protocol. I think
the Apache Webserver accepts both. (\r\n and \n)

 

[Darryl L. Pierce]

It is kind of silly, and the cause of a lot of problems. Unfortunately,
a good bit of existing software doesn't agree that "--" by itself should
suffice. Until it does, it's best to abide by the existing convention,
rather than willfully causing hardship for others.

The reason for the "-- " is that you might have *in your text* that exact
string and don't want to have the rest of your message treated as a
signature. So, the *newsreader* should be stripping trailing spaces when
you *post* but should leave the spaces after the separator intact.

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Daniel_Sj=F6blom?=]

Rene <[email protected]> scribbled the following



Are you sure about that <CR><LF>? Not all platforms use that kind of
end-of-line marker, you know. Mine, for example, uses <LF>.

Sure, but <CR><LF> is something of a standard on the internet. It is the
EOL marker in for example the NNTP and HTTP protocols. It is not a
platform related issue.

 

[Joona I Palaste]

Daniel Sjöblom <[email protected]_nospam> scribbled the following

Sure, but <CR><LF> is something of a standard on the internet. It is the
EOL marker in for example the NNTP and HTTP protocols. It is not a
platform related issue.

I didn't know that. Thanks for the explanation.

 

[Alex Hunsley]

IF you make a standard, don't tell anyone, and make it hard to tell
what it is by examining other people's work, you bloody well deserve
to have it violated.

Yeah, I must say that creating a delimiter with an invisible trailing
space in it is a very odd thing to do, given that people will miss the
space if they are trying to mimick the standard. Seems stupid to me too.

Although people writing usenet posting software are a bit silly IMO if
they aren't basing their functionality/testing on what RFCs lay down!

alex

 

[Chris Uppal]

Although people writing usenet posting software are a bit silly IMO if
they aren't basing their functionality/testing on what RFCs lay down!

But /is/ the signature thing defined in an RFC ?

I admit that I haven't gone back and checked, but I don't remember it, and I
/do/ remember people asserting on Usenet (so caveat emptor ;-) that it has
never been part of any standard.

-- chris

 

[Simon Higgs]

But /is/ the signature thing defined in an RFC ?

I admit that I haven't gone back and checked, but I don't remember it, and I
/do/ remember people asserting on Usenet (so caveat emptor ;-) that it has
never been part of any standard.

RFC 1036/2646

Simon.

 

[Marco Schmidt]

fup2 comp.lang.java.programmer

Daniel Sjöblom:

Sure, but <CR><LF> is something of a standard on the internet. It is the
EOL marker in for example the NNTP and HTTP protocols. It is not a
platform related issue.

To add a reference for that: RFC 2822, section 2.1.
===
Messages are divided into lines of characters. A line is a series of
characters that is delimited with the two characters carriage-return
and line-feed; that is, the carriage return (CR) character (ASCII
value 13) followed immediately by the line feed (LF) character (ASCII
value 10). (The carriage-return/line-feed pair is usually written in
this document as "CRLF".)
===
<http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html>

Regards,
Marco

 

[Manolis Wallace]

"Conventions don't need to make sense" is what you probably meant, no?

Yes, you are right, that conveys my point much better.

They always SHOULD make sense.

I will stick with the first one ;-)


--
Manolis Wallace
http://www.image.ece.ntua.gr/~wallace/
Image, Video & Multimedia Systems Laboratory
Department of Computer Science
School of Electrical & Computer Engineering
National Technical University of Athens

 

[Amedee Van Gasse]

I changed to using a diferent newsreader.

The new newsreader warns me against replying
to posts that..
a) Cross-post to more than three groups
b) Request a 'reply to' the OP
c) F'Ups are set to a different location
then the original post
d) The group/s are not listed on the local server.

I will not name it,

User-Agent: 40tude_Dialog/2.0.10.1
;-)

for the simple reason that
(I _suspect_) it installed 'free' software on my
PC that was most unwelcome, which I then had to
'hunt down and kill with extreme prejudice'.

But just thought I should point out that
there are alternatives.

Which you can all find on www.newsreaders.com