🚀 go-pugleaf

John Washington <john@wash.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>On 8 Dec, in article <4aae85$rjt@gryphon.looking-glass.org>
>     bnb@gryphon.demon.co.uk "Brian Blackmore" wrote:

>BB> John Washington <john@wash.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>BB> [ deletion ]
>BB> >> 2. It makes writting code to rewrap an article almost impossible and
>BB> 
>BB> >Rubbish (IMHO).  Whether you writt code or write it, it's
>BB> >a SMoP.  You merely need to identify the presence of several
>BB> >lines containing something like BB> rather than >.
>BB> 
>BB> Have you tried? I have, let me tell you it *is* difficult.

>That old chestnut, eh?  Negatives are not proofs.

[ deletion ]

>There are two kinds of people in this country, 'can-do's
>and 'no-can-do's, and the latter are taking the
>Great out of Britain.  How about an RFD for demon.ip.status-quo,
>and the rest of us can use a *developers* group for
>discussing development.  Sparking ideas off one another,
>debating the merits of alternatives, & moving forward.

Read any books on development and they will often tell you that one of the
most difficult things to do is to realise when a project won't work and
when it is going wrong. British industry is full of projects that have not
worked or have gone seriously wrong because nobody had the guts to point
out that something is fundamentally fawed so that it can be corrected in
time. The process of somebody telling you that something won't work is
*not* a time to ignore them, it is a time to either prove them wrong or to
find a workaround the problems that they have put forward.

>BB> As anyone who has ever tried will tell you, writing any algorthim to
>BB> wrap any type of text is in general a pain and always comes up with
>BB> incredibly messy and awkward to maintain code. Without ID quoting it
>BB> is difficult enough to write a good wrapping algorthim for usenet, in
>BB> addition to the

>Which is exactly why we need a bit of lateral thinking.

>Assistance in the header would go a long way, I believe.
>I've already mentioned this elsewhere.  No doubt it's
>not the only possible solution.  Let's look for more
>solutions.  Looking for problems, that's easy.  Why
>throw away your life on that?  For Heaven's Sake, get
>out there and try inspiring people.  Get them bashing
>the rocks together, who knows what may come of it.

Correct assistance in the header would go a long way, if it could be made
to stick, my personal opinion is that neither the standard makers nor the
newsreader authors are particulary prepared to support yet another
non-standard header and thus it won't work. Not traditionally quoting an
ID-quote (especially adding spaces) would also go a long way, however I
don't think that every newsreader would end up doing this so it would get
broke eventually.

Now I have taken a long hard look at the problems that ID quoting presents
and IMHO although the problems are not insurmountable, but the risks that
allowing such a method of quoting are not outweighted by the benifits that
the quoting method would allow.

[ Here endeth this conversation, all followups redirected to poster ]

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