Perl DBI Module: SQL query where there is space in field name

[Waylen Gumbal]

Nope. Post plain text in text only groups.

Right. But let me pose this; In the 1980's and even in the 90's, this
was the way things were done, and a lot of it was for technical reasons,
right? Do those reasons still really exist? Bandwidth is cheap, screen
resolutions large, ram plentiful, HD sizes growing like there's no
tomorrow, so why use old tech to as a reason to prevent moving forward
in a medium such as UseNet ? Any modern news reader should be able to
easily handle multipart messages and at least basic HTML without
breaking a sweat, so why stifle innovation in the name of preserving old
20+ year old paradigms?


Is anyone still using an 80x25/50 column terminal? What real systems out
there don't have a GUI, I mean come on people, time to come out of the
past already. I'm not saying we should all post in HTML, I prefer plain
myself, but we should not be so afraid of posts that contain
HTML/multiparts. A good tool should be able to, at the very least, deal
with such posts as a user sees fit.

 

[A. Sinan Unur]

....

HTML without breaking a sweat, so why stifle innovation in the name of
preserving old 20+ year old paradigms?

There is no innovation here. Yeah, there is an attempt to change
something but not all change qualifies as innovation. No one's cute
color scheme, liberal use of different font sizes, cute little graphics
provides any enhanced value to me. Frankly, if one cannot express your
programming question (and answers, hopefully, but you just seem to be
another incarnation of the poster whose only purpose here is to argue
against useful conventions rather than trying to help others with their
questions), then one does not belong in a technical group. Knitting or
gardening, maybe.

Is anyone still using an 80x25/50 column terminal? What real systems
out there don't have a GUI, I mean come on people, time to come out of
the past already. I'm not saying we should all post in HTML, I prefer
plain myself, but we should not be so afraid of posts that contain
HTML/multiparts.

I am not afraid. Posting in anything other than plain text signals that
the poster is either ignorant or rude.

A good tool should be able to, at the very least,
deal with such posts as a user sees fit.

Yes, I have a good tool for that. Won't be seeing your messages again.

Sinan

--
A. Sinan Unur <[email protected]>
(remove .invalid and reverse each component for email address)

comp.lang.perl.misc guidelines on the WWW:
http://www.rehabitation.com/clpmisc/

 

[Andrew DeFaria]

Multipart is a feature of EMail. This here is Usenet. There is no such
thing as multipart in Usenet. Therefore anything following his
signature delimiter line must be his signature.

"I'm gonna place my head in the sand. Don't you be telling me to take it
out!"

Ah the sound of tolerance....

 

[Andrew DeFaria]

I thought it's UseNet ? I've seen many people make this point before
around here so I'm surprised a regular would make such a slip. Any
newbie would be tarred and feathered to high hell by now for doing that.

Hmmm... By Martijin's rules then if Jüregen mentions this again... well
then he must be a troll!

Only if you look at the raw source of the message, but looking at raw
source is not what you would do, right? No, you would look at the
plain-text part of the message, which has a sig 2 lines long.

The facts, although interesting, are inconvenient to his argument...

 

[Andrew DeFaria]

Right. But let me pose this; In the 1980's and even in the 90's, this
was the way things were done, and a lot of it was for technical
reasons, right? Do those reasons still really exist? Bandwidth is
cheap, screen resolutions large, ram plentiful, HD sizes growing like
there's no tomorrow, so why use old tech to as a reason to prevent
moving forward in a medium such as UseNet ? Any modern news reader
should be able to easily handle multipart messages and at least basic
HTML without
breaking a sweat, so why stifle innovation in the name of preserving
old 20+ year old paradigms?

Because this allows these pinheads to feel important. Change is hard to
do for many people. Personally I feel sorry for them.

Is anyone still using an 80x25/50 column terminal?

I do! But they're contained in these little windows... ;-)

What real systems out there don't have a GUI, I mean come on people,
time to come out of the past already. I'm not saying we should all
post in HTML, I prefer plain myself, but we should not be so afraid of
posts that contain HTML/multiparts. A good tool should be able to, at
the very least, deal with such posts as a user sees fit.

I often point out that less(1) (at least on a version of SuSE that I
once used) would render any file that ended in .html into ASCII text.
Now how old is less? And why can less perform this magic and the
newsreader that these guys use not be able to do it?

Jürgen's prior post is telling. Because he stubbornly holds fast to the
past and blurts out, like a little kid mind you, "no everything after
the -- and space must be considered the signature... blah, blah, blah
I'm not hearing you... blah, blah, blah". These people reek of that
mentality. And unfortunately the very same type of people maintain the
newsreaders that these people use. Eventually they'll die off...

 

[Andrew DeFaria]

There is no innovation here.

And that really said all you need to know - about them...!

Yeah, there is an attempt to change something but not all change
qualifies as innovation. No one's cute color scheme, liberal use of
different font sizes, cute little graphics provides any enhanced value
to me.

Sigh. The same old tired arguments. Where in any of my postings did you
see "cute color scheme, liberal use of different font sizes, cute little
graphics"? Answer: Nowhere. Bad argument. Additionally, if your
newsreader rendered it into plain text then you'd still not see "cute
color scheme, liberal use of different font sizes, cute little
graphics". In short - you have no argument!

Frankly, if one cannot express your programming question (and answers,
hopefully, but you just seem to be another incarnation of the poster
whose only purpose here is to argue against useful conventions rather
than trying to help others with their questions), then one does not
belong in a technical group. Knitting or gardening, maybe.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. I am, of course, not
required to share it!

I am not afraid. Posting in anything other than plain text signals
that the poster is either ignorant or rude.

By your rules, perhaps (see your rules in a previous posting).

Yes, I have a good tool for that. Won't be seeing your messages again.

So how's that sand taste?

 

[Martijn Lievaart]

This would seem to be the opposite from what I've seen. All the major
graphical ones (at least for Windows) to handle it, and they all allow
you to specify which format should take precedence. I have that set to
"plain", so I don't actually see the HTML part of a multipart posting

I haven't "done" Windows for ages, but I used to use Xnews, which
definately did not do mime-multipart. I'ld be very surprised if anything
besides Outlook and possibly Mozilla and friends do mime-multipart.

M4

 

[Martijn Lievaart]

Only if you look at the raw source of the message, but looking at raw
source is not what you would do, right? No, you would look at the
plain-text part of the message, which has a sig 2 lines long.

Uhm, no. Any serios newsreader does not "do" mime-multipart, so normally
reading the message does show a 120+ lines signature.

M4

 

[Andrew DeFaria]

Uhm, no. Any serios newsreader does not "do" mime-multipart,

No broken ones don't "do" mime-multipart...

so normally reading the message does show a 120+ lines signature.

Yes the real question is why are you reading it!

 

[Peter J. Holzer]

Well, there is this slight problem of standards, encoded into RFCs. You
don't /have/ to follow them, but it's in general a good idea.

The relevant RFC in this case would be RFC 2046. As fas as I can see
Andrew did follow the RFC.

HTML in usenet postings is definitely not standard and in fact, any
serious newsreader (on any platform, even on Windows) does not render
it. Even worse, mime-multipart, although a standard for mail, is not a
standard for usenet.

You are mixing up technical standards and social standards. RFC
1036 refers to RFC 822 for the article format which has later been
extended by the series of MIME RFCs (starting with RFC 1341 in
1992). Now one could argue that since 1341 came after 1036 and 1036 was
never revised, 1341 is irrelevant - only plain text US-ASCII is allowed
in usenet messages. However, that is clearly not practical - Usenet is
used for discussions in many languages, most of which cannot be
expressed adequately in US-ASCII. Even if the discussion language is
English, the topic of the discussion (for example, how to process
Chinese text in a Perl program) may require another character set. And
there is absolutely no RFC or other authoritative document which says
that MIME Content-Type is ok for Usenet and MIME multipart is not.
Technically, you have to accept MIME as a whole or not at all.

However, there is a strong *convention* that Usenet messages (outside of
the binary groups) should contain only plain text. No images, no fancy
markup, no sound files, no video. That's a social convention, not a
technical one. Of course, newsreader authors often only implement
features for which they see a need - so if nobody posts multipart
messages, why should they implement support for them? (the newsreader you
use - Pan - seems to be quite curious in supporting multipart/mixed, but
not multipart/alternative).

hp

 

[Peter J. Holzer]

I haven't "done" Windows for ages, but I used to use Xnews, which
definately did not do mime-multipart. I'ld be very surprised if anything
besides Outlook and possibly Mozilla and friends do mime-multipart.

On Linux, Mozilla and KNode have decent multipart support. Pan has
partial support. I'm quite sure that GNUS has good multipart support,
but since I don't like Emacs, I've never tried it. There is a patch for
slrn, but since nobody I consider worth reading is posting multipart
messages, I haven't tried that, either. I don't know about the other
text-based readers (tin, trn, ...).

hp

 

[Peter J. Holzer]

There is no innovation here. Yeah, there is an attempt to change
something but not all change qualifies as innovation. No one's cute
color scheme, liberal use of different font sizes, cute little graphics
provides any enhanced value to me.

I disagree with that. I consider especially graphics to be very valuable
in explaining a problem or a solution. We can make do with crude ASCII
graphics (or less crude Unicode graphics), or we can include links to a
graphic on some webserver, but the ability to include graphics
(preferably vector graphics) in a posting would sometimes (not often, I
agree) help to get a point across a lot better.

hp

 

[A. Sinan Unur]

I disagree with that. I consider especially graphics to be very
valuable in explaining a problem or a solution. We can make do with
crude ASCII graphics (or less crude Unicode graphics), or we can
include links to a graphic on some webserver, but the ability to
include graphics (preferably vector graphics) in a posting would
sometimes (not often, I agree) help to get a point across a lot
better.

OK, granted ... However, I had just looked at the most recent 5 MB
seminar speaker announcement the entire information content of which
consisted of paper title, speaker's name, time and place.

When you get a few of these every day, even on a fast connection, the
time spent waiting for email to download becomes not so insignificant.

So, for every message where the quality of communication improves
somewhat thanks to figures etc, I fear there will be n (for n not small)
"send me teh codez plz" messages but this time with attachments which
need to be virus scanned before one can even take a look.

Nah, just give me plain text.

Sinan
--
A. Sinan Unur <[email protected]>
(remove .invalid and reverse each component for email address)

comp.lang.perl.misc guidelines on the WWW:
http://www.rehabitation.com/clpmisc/

 

[Andrew DeFaria]

You are mixing up technical standards and social standards.

Exactly, and the social standards are just suggestions made by obvious
anti-social people...

RFC 1036 refers to RFC 822 for the article format which has later been
extended by the series of MIME RFCs (starting with RFC 1341 in 1992).
Now one could argue that since 1341 came after 1036 and 1036 was never
revised, 1341 is irrelevant - only plain text US-ASCII is allowed in
usenet messages. However, that is clearly not practical - Usenet is
used for discussions in many languages, most of which cannot be
expressed adequately in US-ASCII. Even if the discussion language is
English, the topic of the discussion (for example, how to process
Chinese text in a Perl program) may require another character set. And
there is absolutely no RFC or other authoritative document which says
that MIME Content-Type is ok for Usenet and MIME multipart is not.
Technically, you have to accept MIME as a whole or not at all.

And let's not forget the fact that MIME multipart HTML is plain text!
Ugly plain text but plain text nonetheless. Anybody using a brain dead
ASCII only newsreader with 20+ year old mentality should be used to ugly
by now!

 

[Andrew DeFaria]

OK, granted ... However, I had just looked at the most recent 5 MB
seminar speaker announcement the entire information content of which
consisted of paper title, speaker's name, time and place.

Huh?!? Please explain how he managed to eat up 5 MB for such little bit
of information.

When you get a few of these every day, even on a fast connection, the
time spent waiting for email to download becomes not so insignificant.

So which are you arguing about now? Email or Usenet? Also quantify this.
How many people are doing this?

So, for every message where the quality of communication improves
somewhat thanks to figures etc, I fear there will be n (for n not
small) "send me teh codez plz" messages but this time with attachments
which need to be virus scanned before one can even take a look.

Please let's not limit ourselves based on your fears. IOW we need to
have a realistic number for n. Also, this is Email you are speaking of
whereas we were speaking of Usenet. You confuse or blend the two to
support your argument which is dishonest at best. However lots of your
argument is filled with dishonesty.

Finally, if you haven't noticed, this is already happening in email
every day, not necessarily waste but people are not restricting
themselves to plain text only. And, they find it useful. And,
technology, bandwidth and storage capacity have increased many fold.

Your argument are non persuasive, old, antiquated as more and more
people simply write you and your kind off. You're a dying breed. People
argued like crazy to keep their buggy whips too. People hold on to all
kinds of silly and dying ideas. For example, more people read their news
online. People listen to MP3s and CD aren't selling anymore. The music
industry and sales of mechanicals is in the crapper because they keep
the "it's gotta be all plain text" style of mentality. The cable
companies are next. Printed media also feels the strain as well as the
post office. It's all the same mentality "if it was good enough for my
grandfather... why change...etc...".

Nah, just give me plain text.

Listen buddy, you can have your plain text. Who's telling *you* to stop?
Nobody. You're telling me to do it your way. How pompous! And I actually
do do it your way - the plain text is posted first. After you're done
reading that tell me what compels you to continue to read? Answer:
Nothing but your own holier than thou attitude so that you can read that
and then bitch about it. Nobody's forcing you to read any of my posts.
Nobody's forcing you to read any more than the beginning plain text part
that you so love. Face it - you just like to bitch (so I bitch back).

 

[Charlton Wilbur]

SP> If there were a serious proposition made to write a new RFC
SP> defining how multipart/alternative messages were to be handled,
SP> I'd be all for it. But for now, in the absence of such a
SP> standard, the polite thing to do IMHO is to refrain from posting
SP> what many will see as gibberish.

It has been my observation for some time that people who insist on
posting in a gibberish format are very likely to post gibberish
content. So it is with Mr DeFaria: the content of his posts is not
worth reading, and my newsreader plonks text/plain and
multipart/alternative with equal facility.

Charlton

 

[Martijn Lievaart]

The relevant RFC in this case would be RFC 2046. As fas as I can see
Andrew did follow the RFC.

I beg to differ.

You are mixing up technical standards and social standards. RFC 1036

No, I'm trying not to, although I agree that the technical standards are
less than clear and the social standards important as well.

refers to RFC 822 for the article format which has later been extended
by the series of MIME RFCs (starting with RFC 1341 in 1992). Now one
could argue that since 1341 came after 1036 and 1036 was never revised,
1341 is irrelevant - only plain text US-ASCII is allowed in usenet
messages. However, that is clearly not practical - Usenet is used for

This is correct.

discussions in many languages, most of which cannot be expressed
adequately in US-ASCII. Even if the discussion language is English, the
topic of the discussion (for example, how to process Chinese text in a
Perl program) may require another character set. And there is absolutely
no RFC or other authoritative document which says that MIME Content-Type
is ok for Usenet and MIME multipart is not. Technically, you have to
accept MIME as a whole or not at all.

This is also correct. Technically speaking, only ASCII is allowed on
Usenet by the RFCs.

That this is completely impractical, yes, I agree wholeheartedly. The
RFCs need updating, badly, which I also said in the post you are replying
to.

The current state of affairs is that most usenet readers either use
Latin-1 (or Windows1252), or pay attention to the Content-type header.
And many do this badly btw. (I would have to search for the details, I
know Pan hasn't let me down yet, but I frequently encounter other
newsreaders that make a mess. On further research it's always the other
newsreader that is at fault. Stuff like setting a correct Content-type
header for ISO-Latin-1, but forgetting to translate the message you're
replying to from utf-8).

However, there is a strong *convention* that Usenet messages (outside of
the binary groups) should contain only plain text. No images, no fancy
markup, no sound files, no video. That's a social convention, not a
technical one. Of course, newsreader authors often only implement
features for which they see a need - so if nobody posts multipart
messages, why should they implement support for them? (the newsreader
you use - Pan - seems to be quite curious in supporting multipart/mixed,
but not multipart/alternative).

Ah thanks for the correction. I don't do binaries anymore on usenet, so I
didn't know that.

M4

 

[Peter J. Holzer]

The principle is sound - a picture is worth a thousand words.

But the implementation might be difficult. Usenet is propagated across many
thousands of local servers, and each message takes up space on each one of
those servers. To manage storage, messages are only retained for a fixed
amount of time, with that time being far, far shorter in groups that allow
binary attachments such as images. GigaNews, for instance, retains messages
in "binaries" groups for 200 days,

If they can afford to keep the (mostly automated) flood of pictures,
videos, sound-tracks, etc. in the binary groups for 200 days, they won't have a
problem with a few hand-crafted sketches in tech groups. You just very
effectively argued against your own point.

But GigaNews isn't an average news server. Most newsservers (by numbers,
but possibly not by users) are small, often run by individuals, and
restricted to text only. They might have problems if their bandwidth and
diskspace requirements triple because of HTML, or multiply by 10 because
people include video sequences as signatures. But I don't really think
so. Usenet was a major bandwidth-hog in the 1990's, but now it is
insignificant compared to the web, P2P traffic, etc.

The switch to a rich-text + graphics medium would require a lot of work by
a lot of people, and would increase storage requirements, decrease the time
that messages are retained on local servers, or both. It's really rather
hard to justify that time & expense when the web is sitting right next door
with all the multimedia one can handle.

Usenet is very different from web forums. Among the most important
differences (for me) are:

* Usenet defines a common transport and message format, but no user
interface. Every user can choose the NUA he is most comfortable with.
On a web formum you have to use the interface provided by the forum
maintainer.

* Newsgroups exist independently from any particular server. No one
owns a newsgroup and can shut it down or censor it (with the exception
of moderated newsgroups). A web forum is usually moderated and can
vanish at any time if the maintainer isn't interested in it any more.

* Newsgroups form some kind of coherent whole. I have get a complete
list of all the newsgroups in comp.ALL and choose the most
appropriate. They don't overlap much. And I can crosspost to a
different group and set a followup-to header to continue a discussion
in a better group if it has drifted from the topic. Each web forum is
isolated.

* I can read all newsgroups through a single interface. With web forums,
I have to poll a lot of different servers. RSS makes that simpler, but
it only provides an overview. To get at the actual content, I still
have to visit lots of different web sites, each with its own
idiosyncratic user interface.

These are characteristics of usenet I like and want to preserve. I do
read a lot of newsgroups. I also read a lot of mailing lists (which
share the first and last point with newsgroups, but lack the other two).
I don't read any web forum regularly. They are just too much effort.

hp

 

[Peter J. Holzer]

No, but the relevant standards are still at that level. If you disagree
with that, then by all means go through the relevant steps to update them.
You'll probably find a lot of people who agree with you.

Well, USEFOR did actually get RFC 3977 published after about 10 years or
so. So there is hope.

Where are the standards that specify how a compliant news reader is required
to handle multipart messages?

RFC 2046.

Why should a news reader handle them differently than a mail reader?

Without such standards, goals such as this, as sensible as they are in
principle, are very difficult to implement.

Bullshit. MIME may be difficult to implement (it has a few gotchas) but
there is a standard.

If there were a serious proposition made to write a new RFC defining how
multipart/alternative messages were to be handled, I'd be all for it.

No new RFC is necessary. The RFC relevant was written in 1992 and last
revised in 1996.

hp

 

[Andrew DeFaria]

Where are the standards that specify how a compliant news reader is
required to handle multipart messages? Without such standards, goals
such as this, as sensible as they are in principle, are very difficult
to implement.

How? Or if? How's already documented.

Some tools deal with them one way, some another; some people see his
sig, some don't. And, because there's no relevant standard to which
anyone can point and say "*that* is how it's done people, get it
together!" there's no basis on which to claim that one way or another
is wrong. Sure there is....
If there were a serious proposition made to write a new RFC defining
how multipart/alternative messages were to be handled, I'd be all for
it. But for now, in the absence of such a standard, the polite thing
to do IMHO is to refrain from posting what many will see as gibberish.

The polite thing to do would be to STFU about it in the first place.