Re: Warning -- ASCII art and Netscape Messenger 5.0

Ok I thought this would be discussed better in netscape.pubic.mozilla.mail-news but since were
having it here... I might as well give my two cents here

> >> * show :) or :-) as a smiley face graphic (which could be awful for some
> >>   ASCII art pictures).
> >We will leave ":)" alone, we just change " :)", which should be more
> >secure.
>
> Why change usenet and e-mail traditions? And how about ":-)))", ";-)",
> ":-*" or "|-/"? Not to mention "@--\--\--"
>
> Thinking up new emoticons is part of the fun of posting in any NG.
>
> Just leave emoticons alone and save yourself a lot of programming and
> headache and us a lot of angryness (angryness is not the right word, but i
> can't think of another. Sorry).
>
> If that argument can't convince you, take a look at MS Word, it also
> changes emoticons into stupid smileys.

Totally agree ..
Graphic smilies are fun and games - not very useful - either no graphic smilies or option to
OPT-IN.
btw how would you catch all the hundreds of smilies out there ..
:) 8) =8) >8) >;> 8:-)  :D  ]|>  @:)  0:)  %}  just to name a few ..
Would you do a grapic for ALL of them ?

And should they all be faces ?.. you could do a cow for ]8> (the cow smilie)

(just made that up - it really is part of the fun thinking thoose up!)

> >> On the positive side, they are discussing ways of detecting when plain
> >> text is ASCII art and when it isn't, so that even people who read
> >> messages in a proportional font will see ASCII art in a fixed-width font.
> >I will step into this. We still have no good rule to detect ASCII-art,
> >that doesn't sound like "60% of ...". Can somebody give me a good *and*
> >simple (easy to remember and figure out with just using the software)
> >rule? It should catch ASCII-tables, but shouldn't trigger, if not
> >appropriate.
>
> It _could_ be done by requesting people posting ascii-art to precede their
> art by some sort of tag like <ascii> </ascii>, but frankly, i don't think
> ascii-artists would want to do that.

A slightly better solution would be an X-field like X-MONOSPACE .. because it would'nt be shown
in mail/newsreaders that did'nt support this.

Besides you can already do <pre></pre>.

Any and all text being passing trough (be it sending or reading) a mail/newsreader should NOT
be altered, but be displayed AS IS (and be pr. default displayed in a fixed-width font).
That the ideal solution - A basis to work from.
THEN we can start doing colouring and URL-parsing , and many of these option should not be on
by default but be offered as an OPT-IN option - NOT OPT-OUT.

The only thing i would care to put on  pr. default would be the colouring of commented text
 >> he said this | >she said that ) and sig lines.
And GOOD url-parsing.

like :
[DELIMITER][sh|f|h|x]ttp://[A STRING CONTAINING AT LEAST ONE VALID URL CHAR].[VALID TOPLEVEL
DOMAIN][DELIMITER]

and for mail:(and finger - why have'nt anyone built in a finger client in a mailreader that
could click/rightclick on a mailadress and finger it? - it's so much better than the business
card attachments )

[DELIMITER]mailto:[A STRING CONTAINING AT LEAST ONE VALID MAILADDRESS CHAR]@[A STRING OF VALID
CHARS].[VALID TOPLEVEL DOMAIN][DELIMITER]

and for news:

[DELIMITER]news:[A STRING CONTAINING AT LEAST TWO VALID CHARS].[A STRING OF VALID
CHARS][DELIMITER]

It would a shame to see mozilla do ugly urlparsing - OE makes one of the worst mistakes ..
file://anychar is made a URL pointing to file://anychar .. What idiot would mail or post
something to a newsgroup that references his local hardrive ?


OK for *slightly* better verification of ascii-art :

ANY text not pure 7bit ascii is not ascii-art - But then again some posts extended-ascii-art.
That could be caught by saying ANY not pure 7bit ascii OR 8bit delimiters like : ���������
actually the whole range from alt+192 to alt+254  with a few exceptions.

Because with a assumption like this you could be fairly sure that text in foreign languages
would be detected correct - Because they use the 192-254 range for special characters.
( f.eks s�dan her )
 [ F.x like this ]

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