Re: End of line standards

Dear all,

	Terry wrote talking about cross-platform end-of-line 
problems.  I use BBEdit on the Macintosh which deals transparently 
with either standard.  The very basic text editor that comes with the 
Mac - "Simpletext", equivalent I guess to Win95's "Notepad" - 
displays small boxes at the start of line if a DOS format file is 
loaded, and makes a mess of Unix files, as it doesn't recognise their 
eol $0A's.  However, Simpletext is so limited that I would be 
surprised if anyone used it for editing HTML files, especially given 
that there is a cut-down version of BBEdit available free!

	Another contributor to the list recently pointed out that the 
HTML spec actually specifies the DOS standard CR/LF format for best 
compatibility.  Even though there is a small file-size overhead in 
this old "teletype" standard, it is none-the-less the standard, and 
said overhead is really quite small.

	For my two cents' worth, I would recommend detecting any of 
the end-of-line formats incoming, storing them internally by whatever 
means, and writing out the CR/LF on output.  We seem to be going down 
the road of having a multitude of configurable options on Tidy, so if 
the rest of the group wanted to be able to output either the Mac or 
Unix standard instead, then I wouldn't be too unhappy to have an 
option to allow them to do that.  However, Tidy was created to make 
legal files, so shouldn't it really stick to the spec?

		Regards,

			Peter Vince


Home: Barney.Wol@noctua.demon.co.uk
Work: Peter.Vince@bbc.co.uk
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Received on Friday, 28 July 2000 18:13:39 UTC