Makey@LOGICON.ARPA (Jeff Makey) (01/07/89)
In article <6182@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes: >(Referring to a standard for sending databases over the net): >> =- Format can be ASCII or UUENCODED binary. > >We have two new versions of netnews coming out within the month -- C >news and TMNN (News 3.0). I believe both of them are 8-bit-clean, that >is, the data part of a message can have any 8-bit characters in it >(including nulls and very long lines). Most of this support is >necessary for "un-American" :-) character set support anyway. If this is >really true, we should consider simply sending binaries as binaries. Even if it is true, posting binary files in binary format is a bad idea for several reasons: 1) Not all machines have 8-bit bytes. Multics, DEC-10, and DEC-20 machines (there may be others) all have 9-bit bytes (and 36-bit words). Some of the major archive sites on the Internet still use this ancient 36-bit hardware, and they can't be ignored. 2) My terminal does strange things when it sees certain escape sequences. The last thing I want is to be reading an article that suddenly includes a binary section. 3) Many sites will continue to run obsolete news systems for years. Why don't these wonderful new news systems have builtin binary file encoders/decoders (similar to the rot13 support in rn)? I think that would solve the problem. Note that I have directed followups to news.software.b (for lack of a better place). :: Jeff Makey Department of Tautological Pleonasms and Superfluous Redundancies Department Disclaimer: Logicon doesn't even know we're running news. Internet: Makey@LOGICON.ARPA UUCP: {nosc,ucsd}!logicon.arpa!Makey