C to Java Byte Code

[Al MacHonahey]

I had to look twice to even figure out what they were
complaining about. Gnus does "quote-level color-coding", and it
works just as expected... which is to say quite correctly with
your articles as well as with others.

You must be horribly blidn then, sir. The entire point is Dik's
quoting break on many readers and parsers, ie: thye don't get parsed
as quotes on most readers/parsers.

There is nothing wrong with asking someone to follow a universal
UseNet standard thats been in place for decades, but some people wont
listen to any reason and think they are god..... sigh

 

[Al MacHonahey]

Floyd L. Davidson coughed up:

...[rip]...

The point you have *missed* is that 99.9% of all Usenet readers
do the appropriate thing with what Dik T. Winters is posting.

You've tried them all, have you?

And that number isn't weighted by the number of folks actually using
them. I'm guessing that the number of folks using OE with OE_QuoteFix
is very large.

And this is the first time I've ever seen this issue before, and I've
been in usenet for a long time. So Dik T. Winters' style post is
certainly not a common occurrence.

And as I was trying to point out, it's not common for very good reasons.

That because, unlike Dik, other people have actually got a clue of
what and WHY some things are done on UseNet in the way they have been
for decades.

 

[Al MacHonahey]

Have you read what I wrote? I use this kind of quoting already about 17
years. Once upon a time it was propagated for good reasons, and so I
started with it in early 1987.

And people even then asked you to fix it. The onyl thing that was
propagated from that was you to people's killfiles.

So who is changing what? See:
<http://groups.google.nl/[email protected]>
and also see that Google has no problems with it; colour-coding is OK.

For the most part, no, but it causes google to treat non quoted text
that happens to start with whitespace and a ">". Seems broken to me.

Also, you were already killfiled by the time by some, after being
repeatedly asked to fix your damn quoting.

Google apparently knows a bit more about quoting than other systems.

And a lot more than you, apparently.

The apparent requirement that quotation marks should *not* be preceded
by a space is an arbitrary change from previous practice.

No, it's been an accepted UneNet standard since almsot the beginning
of UseNet. Stop trying to find cheap and fact-twisting excuses.

(To be
entirely correct, I changed it between 11 November 1986 and 25 April
1987.)

And this serves to show how long you've been utterly clueless, or
unwilling to reason.

 

[J. J. Farrell]

And not just people using OE_QuoteFix, other readers as well. OEQF is
just the tip of the ice burg. I've seen styles like Dik make things hard
to read in google groups as well.

URL, please. Dik's style works fine in Google Groups in my experience,
and I agree it is more readable than the commoner style.

 

[J. J. Farrell]

Mr Dik Winter, this is the result of white spae before the quote token.
This serves as an exellent example of what can happen, and why we are
asking you to fix this

Nonsense. It's the result of using a broken or misconfigured
news reader.

 

[J. J. Farrell]

The text after "Dik T. Winter coughed up:" is in fact Thomas's quoting
of Dik, which got horribly miss wrapped, mainly because of the white
space before his quote char. Why should everyone change the way thing
have bene done the past decade anda half because one person decides to
diverge from that accepted norm?

I'm puzzled. What has "the past decade and a half" got to do with
anything? Dik's been quoting in this way in his posts to Usenet
for well over 17 years. Why should he change because you choose
to use a broken program to read his postings?

 

[Alfred Z. Newmane]

Agent--if the little things that annoy me don't annoy you so much--
isn't horrible (yes, I AM damning with faint praise, but you may
not object to its faults as much as I do). It does color code quotes
(one level--colored or not colored) and it does allow some tailoring
of what you see in a group (has watched posts, kept posts).....

No, I take it back. Agent's crap.

That's good to know.

Consider this: in the editor, it word wraps what I type just fine,
but completely ignores quoted material. Therefore, I have to
manually re-wrap quotes to fit my line length.

Or, if you double-click a word and then attempt to drag-highlight
other words.... nothing happens. Only the double-clicked word
remains highlighted (what idiot thought of that?!?!).

Ineed. Another classic example of a programmer's try-your-own-thing gone
horribly wrong.

Or, it's sort of a quasi-MDI application (multiple windows in a big
window), but its behavior is annoyingly non-standard. The part I
hate most is that the "main" window is a three pane deal with your
list of groups, list of articles and current article. But I want
articles in their own window, thank you, AND I want to be able to
have multiple article windows open. But all this piece of crap
will give you is one article window. You can open a second "main"
window, but who needs that?

I've seen very few applications successfully pull off this ort of MDI
style appllication. If thye wantd to do it that way, they should have
looked at Trillian (Pro) at how it lets you have *tabbed) containersfor
message boxes galore, lets you have multiple containers, as well as
"pulling" indicual message boxes "outside" the container, or do away
with the container all together. One of the best semi-MDI designs of
this sort of nature I've ever seen.

Or, the only reasonable way to use it (due the three-pane mistake)
is with the main window maxed. Which means getting at any other
window (your outbox, for e.g.) requires going to the Window menu
and opening it there.

What the hell? Have the authors never used any other reader before, or
did thye just miss the fact that Outbox is always a folder in the list
(and I like when it turns bold (or some other style to indicate change)
when there is something in it (ie: unsent messages), like any other
folder.

And why is my outbox NOT listed with my Inbox and other folders?
Since you have to explicitly go open your outbox, it was weeks before
I noticed that I had a couple messages that never made it out (due
to Agent's "send" command being ^N (send Now)...I just can't get
used to that. ^N is almost universally New.

Another classic example of auothrs completely ignoring how things
normally work in editors. I really don't posibly know what their excuse
could be here, given that ^N not only is a stanard shortcut for New on
Win32 platforms, but also on Mac's (well, Command + N), and I've even
seen this used in some GUI editors in Unix and Linux environments.

Or how about the fact that the folder list only provides a count of
UNREAD articles. Not the total in the folder (a far more useful
number to me, although I prefer both).

It's also braindead in its handling of column widths.

I mean, what kind of bad weed were these jokers smoking? They
might be decent programmers in some fashion, but they ain't much
in the user interface design area.

No, don't buy Agent. You'd only come to regret it.

After that review, I'll keep looking

I have to agree with you here too, if you know of a godo replacement,
I'm all ears (and eyes

[sigh] I really liked Netscape 3. Simple and fast. Stayed the
heck out of my way, and I like that in a piece of software (also
in other drivers . I learned to love Netscape 4.7 and would
have stayed with it, but my company only supports IE, so I lost
the ability to get through our corporate firewall.

NS3 (Gold) was my browser of choice once upon a time. Then came NS4
(bleh, gag, snarl, spit) (Did ya ever try getting CSS to work properly
in it after it was working with othes?) Well I suppose NS4.7 was
alright, and used it for sometime.

As for your corporate firewall, I doubt it would be checking wehat
browser you are (were) using, it probably used soem automatic proxy
settings; just snag them, and insert 'em into NS's prefs and you should
be on your way

I think the problem is often featureitus. The idea that an app
needs to have it all. The CuteFTP product *used*to*be* one of
the best FTP apps out there until they ruined it. Each new
"upgrade" made me like it less and less until--trying to jump
through the misbegotten registration hoops--I finally said, the
hell with it and dis-installed it permanently. (And they've
lost me as a customer forever.)

I hear ya loud and clear. Thats why I never upgraded form BulletProof
FTP (1.07, nice and clean). Later version of it also kidna went the way
of CuteFTP.

Another great example of bulkware if ICQ, after AOL took over it. They
stuffed it like a 200 lbs turkey. (Anothe reason why I went towards
Trillian.)

I've seen a number of really decent shareware apps go down that
road. Pity.

Exactly.

Understood. But you're "talking" to someone who doesn't even
mind top-posting (even prefer it in some circumstances--I tend
to skip posts when all I see on the first screenful is quotes).

Yes, sometiems needless bulk-quoting is a lot mroe of a problem. I find
it extreamly annoying wen I'm surfing the google groups archieves on
some search, only to have to click the show whole post link because some
moron didn;t trim out the needly fat from their post. Come one people,
you don't need to quote 8 paragraphs of irrelevant crap. *grumbles* lazy
bums...

HOW a post is formatted is trivial and way below my radar. [shrug]

True. I've seen enough top-posting, trim-your-damn-post, and such
rantings to last me a life time. IIRC, I started this mess by asking Dik
if you could adjsut his quoting style, seing how many people's readers
would mis wrap his quotes as normal text (as well as my color coder
p ), just seemed like the right thing to do.

Now what was it... oh, yeah,... post ^Now

I'll just ^Send

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

J. J. Farrell coughed up:

I'm puzzled. What has "the past decade and a half" got to do with
anything? Dik's been quoting in this way in his posts to Usenet
for well over 17 years. Why should he change because you choose
to use a broken program to read his postings?

Is there a document somewhere which suggests how to form a standard usenet
quoted reply line? I cannot find it via google.

My understanding was that the line to be quoted has a quote character
(usually >, sometimes | ) inserted at the /beginning/ of the line. Not just
before the first non whitespace character.

Is there someplace that defines (unofficially of course) the guideline for
it?

 

[J. J. Farrell]

In any case, Dik's usual (and arguebly broken) quoting IS a problem,
eventually wrapping get horrendous, forcing others to manually repair
it if any readablity is to be restored.

Dik, once and for all, PLEASE fix you QUOTES. over 90% of readers and
parsers will NOT parse " > ..." as a line of quoted text. "> ..." is
_UNIVERSAL_, meaning any parser should not trouble with it, so why
break this universally accepted paradigm? Seems rather absurd and
selfish.

"Selfish"? Don't be ridiculous. The people demanding that Dik should
change the quoting method he has used for over 17 to suit some broken
Johnny-come-lately newsreaders are the ones who are being selfish.

It's perfectly simple. If you don't like the way Dik posts his messages,
don't read them. If you want to read what Dik posts, tolerate his
style, and perhaps get a less buggy newsreader.

 

[Dik T. Winter]

>
> And people even then asked you to fix it. The onyl thing that was
> propagated from that was you to people's killfiles.

Where do you get that idea? Before this thread I have had only three
complaints in all of the newsgroups I write in, and all three the last
two years only. As I wrote (just look upwards), at one time it was
propagated for good reasons.

>
> For the most part, no, but it causes google to treat non quoted text
> that happens to start with whitespace and a ">". Seems broken to me.
>
> Also, you were already killfiled by the time by some, after being
> repeatedly asked to fix your damn quoting.

Where do you get that idea from? Can you quote *any such request* from
that time?

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

J. J. Farrell coughed up:

(e-mail address removed) (Al MacHonahey) wrote in message


"Selfish"? Don't be ridiculous. The people demanding that Dik should
change the quoting method he has used for over 17 to suit some broken
Johnny-come-lately newsreaders are the ones who are being selfish.

It's perfectly simple. If you don't like the way Dik posts his
messages,
don't read them. If you want to read what Dik posts, tolerate his
style, and perhaps get a less buggy newsreader.

It's not very likely that the masses will outright abandon OE and OEQF
combo.

It's not the fault of OE by the way. OE QuoteFix made a policy decision
that lines that began with non-indent characters (> |) are regular text.

By the way, Dik's choice is /not/

{space} >

it results in

{space} > {space}

which adds to the width of the lines should he quote something that contains
his own text in it somewhere, unless his nr is smart enough to remove the
extra spaces.

OEQF removes extra spaces for us as an options, properly turning

into

But I'm not sure that most do that.

I'm still waiting on an answer from the creator of OEQF. We've chatted
before via email, he should get to this concept soon. I'm betting he's
already "ruled" on this---back when he wrote it the first time, but I just
don't know.

 

[Programmer Dude]

Is there someplace that defines (unofficially of course) the
guideline for it?

Of course not. We're talking about *tradition*, not a standard.

That newsreaders have come to do something fancy with that
tradition means *nothing*. EVERY SINGLE newsreader I know
allows you to configure your quote style. That should tell
you something.

 

[Programmer Dude]

Alfred Z. Newmane writes:

re Forte's Agent...

Ineed. Another classic example of a programmer's try-your-own-thing
gone horribly wrong.

And I can't get used to it. To this day I find myself double-clicking
a word and trying to drag-highlight.... ARG!!

What the hell? Have the authors never used any other reader before, or
did thye just miss the fact that Outbox is always a folder in the list
(and I like when it turns bold (or some other style to indicate change)
when there is something in it (ie: unsent messages), like any other
folder.

Same here. I get the impression they may not have well-developed
GUI skills. It's almost like they didn't know how to implement sub-
folders or something. It's hard to see how they could have missed
the *value* of such a thing.

Another classic example of auothrs completely ignoring how things
normally work in editors. I really don't posibly know what their excuse
could be here, given that ^N not only is a stanard shortcut for New on
Win32 platforms, but also on Mac's (well, Command + N), and I've even
seen this used in some GUI editors in Unix and Linux environments.

Yep. Their menus are a little goofy, too. I find things in what
seems to be the "wrong" place.

After that review, I'll keep looking

Then this has been time well spent! (-:

[sigh] I really liked Netscape 3. Simple and fast. Stayed the
heck out of my way, and I like that in a piece of software (also
in other drivers . I learned to love Netscape 4.7 and would
have stayed with it, but my company only supports IE, so I lost
the ability to get through our corporate firewall.

NS3 (Gold) was my browser of choice once upon a time. Then came NS4
(bleh, gag, snarl, spit) (Did ya ever try getting CSS to work properly
in it after it was working with othes?) Well I suppose NS4.7 was
alright, and used it for sometime.

Concur (particularly wrt the CSS---yeesh!). By "learned to love"
I don't mean it was easy. More a matter of how you can get used
to just about anything.

As for your corporate firewall, I doubt it would be checking wehat
browser you are (were) using, it probably used soem automatic proxy
settings; just snag them, and insert 'em into NS's prefs and you should
be on your way

Right. Only it was never that simple. (At least I could never get
it to work.) There was some sort of active scripting going on in
picking the proxy server (we're a Fortune 50 company, so our systems
are on the large-ish side--multiple proxy servers).

I hear ya loud and clear. Thats why I never upgraded form BulletProof
FTP (1.07, nice and clean). Later version of it also kidna went the way
of CuteFTP.

Yep. I tried to stay with an early version of CuteFTP, but keeping it
registered (when upgrading PCs) was what finally did me in. I found
their help line rather cold and unresponsive, so I decided there were
other fish.

Compare that to a company I want to mention favorably: Axialis. I'd
been using their *outstanding* icon editor for years when the upgraded
the GUI beyond my taste for cruft. Also took away a feature (due to
customer request) that I relied on (the ability to build icon libs).

I complained to their help line and the response was outstanding! First
they explained the situation, *THANKED* me for my honest input (wrt the
GUI cruft)(and I don't mean that political "thankyouforyourinput" thing,
but genuine, "hey guy, you got a good point"). In the end they ended
up *giving* me their corporate edition version which had the library
building feature I needed.

As a result, I'm a loyal fan forever, and I mention them whenever I
can. THAT'S customer service.

So, everyone, go check out http://www.axialis.com/ They make some some
good stuff (NO complaints from me about function!) and they are a very
customer conscious company.

Yes, sometiems needless bulk-quoting is a lot mroe of a problem.

People just don't take the time to edit! (-:

I find it extreamly annoying wen I'm surfing the google groups archieves on
some search, only to have to click the show whole post link because some
moron didn;t trim out the needly fat from their post. Come one people,
you don't need to quote 8 paragraphs of irrelevant crap. *grumbles* lazy
bums...

Lazy Bums, indeed. And if I may diverge into a local political rant:
This provisional ballet thing....here we go again. All because some
people are too lame to properly get registered. ARG!!! Okay, I'm done.

HOW a post is formatted is trivial and way below my radar. [shrug]

True. I've seen enough top-posting, trim-your-damn-post, and such
rantings to last me a life time.

Same here. It saddens me that my fellow programmers can be so anal
and annoying about something so meaningless.

Oh, well, such is life, I guess.

 

[Jerry Coffin]

[ ... ]

Is there a document somewhere which suggests how to form a standard usenet
quoted reply line? I cannot find it via google.

The only official guidelin on the general subject is RFC 1036, which
is ancient and provides no real guidance in this specific area.
Somewhat newer (but still roughly 10 years old) is Henry Spencer's
"Son of RFC 1036", which he published to Usenet as an "RFC Draft to
be" -- i.e. he didn't even consider it sufficiently finished to
qualify as a draft. OTOH, there isn't anything better either...

Taking the Son of RFC 1036 as our guidance, we find only that lines
should be broken "as appropriate", and "Although styles vary widely,
for plain text it is usual to use no left margin..." That's
_extremely_ weak guidance at best -- even reading it as strongly as
possible, I can't see how it could be taken as much more than a
suggestion that Dik's style is mildly unusual.

Then again, IMO one style guide to cover all of Usenet is nearly a
hopeless proposition. I'd _almost_ go so far as to say that for any
style accepted by one newsgroup, there is almost certain to be at
least one other newsgroup where that style would be rejected. Some
things are almost universally rejected, but there seem to be far fewer
that are universally accepted.

 

[Alfred Z. Newmane]

Of course not. We're talking about *tradition*, not a standard.

That newsreaders have come to do something fancy with that
tradition means *nothing*. EVERY SINGLE newsreader I know
allows you to configure your quote style. That should tell
you something.

Well, most don't allow you to put white space before your quote token.
You are right it is a /tradition/, it has always bene tradition to start
a line with a quote character, lest it be counted as local text. furthur
more, most readers that allow for od and unusual quoting styles are
usually features created by people who probably haven't spent a lot of
time in UseNet. (Not always the case, but ther are some poor readers out
there.)

 

[Dik T. Winter]

> Thomas G. Marshall writes:
>
>
> Of course not. We're talking about *tradition*, not a standard.
>
> That newsreaders have come to do something fancy with that
> tradition means *nothing*. EVERY SINGLE newsreader I know
> allows you to configure your quote style. That should tell
> you something.

One interesting thing I found was in one of the FAQs (but I disremember
which). It is stated that when you get the message 'more quoted text
than new text' with a rejection by the system you should first try to
reduce the amount of quoted text, en if you still was sure that all the
quoted text was needed, you should do:
:%s/^>/</
to change the quoting symbol. I am very sure that in earlier releases
it was advised that you should do:
:%s/^>/ >/
but I am not entirely sure. (That FAQ came into being long after I
started using news.)

[ Now try to find out from what time that advice dates ;-) I would think
from about the emergance of 'rn' as successor of 'readnews'.]

An interesting other tid-bit in (I think) the same FAQ is that
originally many people put a non-empty first line in their article
if the actual first line started with a space (and that happened
very much with that quoting style). The reason was that there were
news systems out there that would eat the first part of the article
if the first line started with a space...

 

[Richard Herring]

That would be the Internet-Draft-that-never-made-it, commonly known as
"son of RFC1036", which says:

This SHOULD be done by prefacing each quoted line (even if it is empty)
with the character ">".

Of course not. We're talking about *tradition*, not a standard.

That newsreaders have come to do something fancy with that
tradition means *nothing*. EVERY SINGLE newsreader I know
allows you to configure your quote style.

This one doesn't.

That should tell
you something.

Any chance you could take this discussion somewhere where it's on-topic?
I'd set followups, but it wouldn't be fair to any of the groups it's
being crossposted to at present.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Dik T. Winter coughed up:

One interesting thing I found was in one of the FAQs (but I
disremember
which). It is stated that when you get the message 'more quoted text
than new text' with a rejection by the system you should first try to
reduce the amount of quoted text, en if you still was sure that all
the
quoted text was needed, you should do:
:%s/^>/</
to change the quoting symbol. I am very sure that in earlier releases
it was advised that you should do:
:%s/^>/ >/

I saw this as well yesterday----Not sure what it means.

but I am not entirely sure. (That FAQ came into being long after I
started using news.)

[ Now try to find out from what time that advice dates ;-) I would
think
from about the emergance of 'rn' as successor of 'readnews'.]

An interesting other tid-bit in (I think) the same FAQ is that
originally many people put a non-empty first line in their article
if the actual first line started with a space (and that happened
very much with that quoting style). The reason was that there were
news systems out there that would eat the first part of the article
if the first line started with a space...

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Richard Herring coughed up:

That would be the Internet-Draft-that-never-made-it, commonly known
as "son of RFC1036", which says:

This SHOULD be done by prefacing each quoted line (even if it is
empty) with the character ">".

This one doesn't.

Any chance you could take this discussion somewhere where it's
on-topic? I'd set followups, but it wouldn't be fair to any of the
groups it's being crossposted to at present.

Yes, that's forever a problem---you yank swaths of people out of
conversations by narrowing something that was already widely cross-posted.

 

[Programmer Dude]

>
> Well, most don't allow you to put white space before your quote
> token.

As you can see, Agent does. Interestingly, doing so breaks the
color coding of quotes. On the flip side, it also breaks the
broken behavior of not wrapping quotes.

> You are right it is a /tradition/, it has always bene tradition
> to start a line with a quote character, lest it be counted as
> local text.

Agreed. I'll be interested to see what Agent makes of this post
when it reads it (that is, will it color code the quotes).