29 Dec
2007
29 Dec
'07
7:29 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin once stated:
On Sat, 29 Dec 2007 tiggerlasv at aim.com wrote:
What I've heard---there is no one character that returns the carriage to
the start of the line (CR) and advances down one line (LF). MS-DOS seems to
think both are required, whereas Unix went with one (LF) and add both if
required in the driver code. The older versions of Mac OS (prior to being
Unix under the hood) used CR. And while I wrote code to handle CR, LF,
CRLF, LFCR, I never did see LFCR in the wild.
Another recurring issue for ASCII: what is baskspace supposed to do?
I'm used to systems that use $08 [1] to move the cursor left one column and
overwrite the character there with a space. But Linux (maybe because Linus
was secretly a DEChead?) decided that $7F would move the cursor left one
column and overwrite the character there with a space, but X Windows (which
I use on Linux) seems to want to use $08 for that.
Grrrrr ...
It looks like the carriage returns were stripped
out somehow.
One of the recurring issues of ASCII is:
"What is the ASCII code for newline?" What does your system do when it receives a message
that is "wrong"?
Fergeddabout how Henk's message quotes look on the screen.
In the raw message, BEFORE processing by the mail program, do those parts
of his messages have 0Dh characters? Do they have 0Ah characters?
What OS is Henk using? What mail program? What ISP?
If you read up on the SMTP specification [2], they require the use of CRLF
to terminate each line, and it's up to the receiving side to
add/remove/translate the line ending characters as appropriate. There is
some verbiage in the older SMTP RFC [3] dealing with bare CRs in header
lines (treat it as whitespace, but preserve); I'm not sure if the that has
been carried over to the current standard [2].
-spc (Who now gets to deal with UTF-8 pages served up as ISO-8859-1 or
worse, Windows-1251 ... )
[1] Sorry, I'm old school---hex numbers are preceeded with a currency
sign.
[2] RFC-2821
[3] RFC-821