RE: RS/RE, again (sorry)

> >I can think of at least one system where you get no choice: VMS
> >limits the length of a line in a text file to 256 chars.
> 
> Does that mean that the line of text must have a newline at the
> end of it?

I was a bit off-target in blaming VMS, it's actually some of the VMS
systems software like the EDT editor which imposes the limit. But it
is a serious problem for VMS users, that if they download a text file
(eg an SGML instance) which has lines >256 chars, EDT won't let them 
edit it.

And yes, "lines" for VMS, like for DOS, must end with a CRLF.  A
UNIX-style newline (LF) or a Mac-style linebreak (CR) is insufficient.
FTP in text mode accommodates this happily, but HTTP just shovels bytes
across the network. I don't know if UAs do any newline conversion based
on the MIME type (eg text/plain or text/x-sgml).

///Peter

Received on Monday, 16 December 1996 11:22:14 UTC