sarafian@dsp.analog.com (Alex Sarafian) (06/04/91)
How do I get Pnews to append more than the first four lines of .signature files to posted messages. We are using Cnews, if that's any help. Thanks. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ Alex Sarafian Internet: alex.sarafian@analog.com Analog Devices, Inc. UUCP: ..uunet!analogdv!alex.sarafian 3 Technology Way Voice: 617-461-3987
brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (06/26/91)
Perhaps we should get down to it and add a new header line to the RFC in the next revision. "Trailer" would be a header that was a trailing comment. The newsreader would be expected to display the trailer, if the user desires, at the end of a read article. In fact, one might expect that the newsreader would display the From line, Organization line and Trailer at the end of a message, with the From also appearing at the top. Indeed, a reader could let the user control which headers appear at the top and which at the bottom. Formalizing this would eliminate the problem of duplicated signatures, and some of the other problems with them -- such as the fact that they get searched by kill files and filter programs and have no real definition. Such a commonly long header item would strain or break some software, I guess. That's not necessarily evil, either in that it forces people to fix the software or keeps sigs down. We could go even further, and formalize parts of this trailing comment, so that readers could read just what they wanted. So in a less serious vein we could have headers like: Redundant-email-addresses: Cute-Aphorism: Postal-Address: Ascii-graphic: Favourite-ball-team: Strange-distribution-rules-in-the-name-of-freedom-of-information: -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti) (06/26/91)
In article <1991Jun25.203817.11346@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
Perhaps we should get down to it and add a new header line to the RFC in the
next revision.
"Trailer" would be a header that was a trailing comment. The newsreader
would be expected to display the trailer, if the user desires, at the
end of a read article.
Not necessary; the draft internet standard for multipart, multimedia
internet mail already takes care of this.
You put in a header field "Content-type:" which defines a part separator
(see the headers of this message), and divide up the pieces with that.
In this case I used "emv", but it could be anything.
If you really wanted to you could make a special Content-type: which was
a signature, but really that's not needed. Or you could define a
signature type as a "richtext" tag.
The specs can be had from the files described in the 2d part of this
three-part message.
--emv
-- MSEN Archive Service file verification
thumper.bellcore.com
total 461
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 115424 Jun 20 15:27 BodyFormats.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 195185 Jun 18 20:03 BodyFormats.ps
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 87190 Jun 18 20:03 BodyFormats.ez
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 13952 Jun 18 14:27 Configuration.ez
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 18178 Jun 18 02:55 Configuration.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 39301 Jun 18 02:55 Configuration.ps
found richmail ok
thumper.bellcore.com:/pub/nsb/
--emv--
Edward Vielmetti, MSEN Inc. moderator, comp.archives emv@msen.combrad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (06/29/91)
Something like this isn't enough. While I have never liked signatures and feel they are abused, it is also clear that they are here to stay and should be formalized. Splitting the article into parts, while useful, is not the same as formalizing the signature, unless you have tags or some other indication that the last part (or one of the last parts) is the signature. Mind you, if the readers could be set to display From and Org lines at the bottom of an article (instead of/as well as) the top then we might have a lot less signature abuse. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473