amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker) (03/15/89)
Something that I have been thinking about recently is some kind of extended
article format. Given news readers & posters on workstations and other
beasties with nice displays that can display multiple fonts & so on, it
would be nice to start taking advantage of them. The only problem is that
most people still read news on (relatively) dumb terminals, so we can't just
use Content-Type: and RTF/TeX/PostScript/whatever.
What I was thinking of is ugly, but so far seems workable. Start by having
a Content-Type: field (or X-Content-Type:) that serves as a flag to the
newsreader that the article is in the new format. The format itself is
similar in spirit to the way rn (or "more") interprets line printer
stuff (such as _^Hx to specify an underlined 'x'): if you just print out
or view the file, it should look OK. For example:
_^Hx italicized or underlined 'x'
x^Hx boldface 'x'
`` open double quotes
'' close double quotes
blank line paragraph boundary
> if at start of all lines in a paragraph, quoted text
^H (space-backspace) display rest of line verbatim
etc...
This is just an idea, but I was wondering if anyone else thought that
something like this would be useful or reasonable. It's ugly, but it is
backward-compatible (funny how those two things often go together... :-)).
Comments?
--
Amanda Walker, InterCon Systems Corporation
amanda@lts.UUCP / ...!uunet!lts!amanda / 703.435.8170
--
C combines the flexibility of assembler with the power of assembler.