Exemplary post! [was: making old text publicly available on the web ]

Well said!

Let's all hear it for Dan Riley! (well... let's not _all_ hear
it too many times: send him private email, rather than posting here,
if you would please.)

(1) He cited sources, and excerpted the relavent parts
(2) he was civil
(3) he makes some sense; his terminology is consistent
(4) He didn't make any claims without either
	(a) prefacing them with "I think" or "My reading is..."
		or
	(b) citing sources for independent verification

Folks, let's all take a lesson here. It probably took Riley an extra
10 minutes to surf up a copy of RFC 1521, copy some text, (minor
deduction for no URL for RFC1521. By the way, here's one:
http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1521.txt ) and probably do a little
random fact checking and edit his message before posting.

But look at all the time he saved the rest of us, and look at how
valuable the result is. This mailing list is archived. I think around
1000 people read it -- more, if you count local mailing list exploders.

This was once a thriving technical resource -- THE place to go for
technical discussion of web developments. It's going down hill in
a sea of tech support questions and careless posts. It will only
return to its former usefullness if posters are careful and dilligent.

In message <199507071552.LAA24846@lns598.lns.cornell.edu>, Dan Riley writes:
>murray.altheim@nttc.edu (Murray Altheim) writes:
>
>Maybe I'm missing something here--if the documents aren't HTML, why
>try to serve them as Content-Type: text/html?  Plain text, it seems
>to me, ought to be served as Content-Type: text/plain -- that is what
>it is there for, and presumably that is why PLAINTEXT is deprecated.
>RFC 1521 is a little wishy-washy on formfeeds and tabs, at least for
>character set US-ASCII:
>
>   The complete US-ASCII character set is listed in [US-ASCII].  Note
>   that the control characters including DEL (0-31, 127) have no defined
>   meaning apart from the combination CRLF (ASCII values 13 and 10)
>   indicating a new line.  Two of the characters have de facto meanings
>   in wide use: FF (12) often means "start subsequent text on the
>   beginning of a new page"; and TAB or HT (9) often (though not always)
>   means "move the cursor to the next available column after the current
>   position where the column number is a multiple of 8 (counting the
>   first column as column 0)."
>
>My reading of this is that a web browser ought to handle FF and TAB in
>text/plain in the traditional fashion.  I don't know of any browsers
>that will page text/plain on formfeeds, but that is a quality of
>implementation issue that should be taken up with the browser authors,
>not an HTML issue.
>
>--
>Dan Riley                          Internet:  dsr@lns598.lns.cornell.edu
>Wilson Lab, Cornell University     HEPNET/SPAN: lns598::dsr (44630::dsr)
>	      "Distance means nothing/To me." -Kate Bush

Received on Saturday, 8 July 1995 06:22:10 UTC