🚀 go-pugleaf

John Washington <john@wash.demon.co.uk> wrote:
[ deletion ]
>> 2. It makes writting code to rewrap an article almost impossible and

>Rubbish (IMHO).  Whether you writt code or write it, it's
>a SMoP.  You merely need to identify the presence of several
>lines containing something like BB> rather than >.

Have you tried? I have, let me tell you it *is* difficult.

As anyone who has ever tried will tell you, writing any algorthim to wrap
any type of text is in general a pain and always comes up with incredibly
messy and awkward to maintain code. Without ID quoting it is difficult
enough to write a good wrapping algorthim for usenet, in addition to the
normal finding out where the end of paragraphs are, you have identify what
is quote fluff (not easy considering the range of characters that people
use intermixed with spaces, or just spaces, or sometimes spaces), ensure
when the quote fluff changes a new paragraph is forced (does it have a
blank line between the paragraphs like a normal paragraph normally does?),
try to identify lines that have been subject to people rewrapping without
resetting the quoting properly.

And on top of this you want anyone that write word wrapping code for usenet
to have to identify ID quoting (even when in the middle of other quoting
fluff) ensuring that it doesn't catch a stray > which really should be in
the middle of the text. In fact ID quoting is even more of a pain because
if identified incorrectly a real word might get gobbled up as part of the
quote.

Now from my angle a simple > quote sounds really good and people are
perfectly happy with it. It keeps the code simple, it reduces the bugs, it
is more likely to be correct, you have less complaints because this bizzare
article with this bizzare mix of quoting and probably some maths in the
middle didn't quite quote correctly.

[ deletion ]
>> 4. It doesn't match with what son of RFC1036 recommends.. to quote..

>This is the only one of your points that has any validity
>for me.

And you'll see the reason it asks for this is to make automatic processing
of news articles easier.

[ deletion ]
>Summary: much of the argument hinges around emotive issues.
>I don't base my support for this style on visual or aesthetic
>qualities.  In posts with multiple quote levels it helps the
>reader identify which author wrote what.  I think that helps
>avoid confusion (haven't you ever seen flame wars that start
>"I DID NOT WRITE THAT"?).

Summary:

ID quoting is a pain in the arse technically, and has dubious aesthetic
and confusion removal qualities (it doesn't show people quoting people
correctly, and thus removes the age quality of traditional quoting). If
everyone used it then maybe the effort might be worthwhile, but the
likelihood of that happening is slightly less that the sun turning purple
and doing the can-can every monday night. Until this really high probability
event doth occur we will be stuck with ID quoting being traditionally
quoted making it difficult to spot (for both human and machine), and quite
frankly ugly.

-- 
Brian Blackmore                         http://www.wonderland.org/~eternal/