Re: modem config.............

[Stephen J. Turnbull <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> Jim == Jim Jackson <jj [at] scs.leeds.ac.uk> writes:

Jim> It's Micro$oft bollocks. Your posts contain control bytes
Jim> (ASCII 0s, FE's and FF's) in the Content-Type: text/html;
Jim> section, they are not plain ascii text. Given that the
Jim> standards for internet mail are SOOOOOOOOO simple it's
Jim> amazing just how stupid Microshaft have to be to screw it up.

I certainly agree with your sentiment, but it isn't all that simple.
I also agree with your sentiments about HTML mail, but that is not
Ross's problem (unless he decides to agree with us); Ross quite
politely sent us both the text/html and the text/plain versions, and
if I wasn't a beta tester, I would have my mailer set to prefer
text/plain and never would know about the HTML cock-up. (This isn't
even really a bandwidth issue anymore; the backbone doesn't notice a
couple of kB, and if you use IMAP to fetch messages from your mail
server, only the bytes you want get sent, just like turning images off
in your web browser over a slow link.)

*Attention Conservation Notice*: if you don't want the details, just
count the number of lines in the following explanation, and take my
word for it that it's complicated. ;-)

First, RFC-822 specifies that it is required for mail-handling
utilities to be 7-bit clean. You must be able to handle all 128 ASCII
characters. VM is 7-bit clean, but it doesn't like large quantities
of control characters. In fact, I doubt that Outlook is violating the
mail or MIME standards in any way by including the Unicode text.
(Oops, yes it is; in Unicode's signature byte-order-mark, the first
two bytes of the Unicode text, both do have bit 8 set; I believe that
MIME requires a Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit to cover that.
Cf. one or more of RFC 2045-2049. But I think those are the only
8-bit bytes there.)

The large quantity of leading garbage is just that: garbage.
According to the MIME standard, a good reader will throw it away, or
optionally display it to the reader if it can make sense of it.
Nothing up to the first part-boundary is significant. Most mailers do
put in a statement to the effect that This message is MIME-encoded;
if you see this text, you may not have a MIME mail reader. If not,
you may not get anything sensible out of some or all of the message.
There's nothing says you have to, though.

Jim> one of Microsoft's stategies is to embrace standards then
Jim> entend them in non standard ways to as to entrap people into
Jim> only being able to use their software.

Not relevant here. They haven't embraced (in fact Outlook simply lied
about the content of the HTML portion, and is quite happy to do this
in many circumstances; Microsoft apparently expects the user to
explicitly set the MIME parameters correctly without help) and they
didn't extend (without the lie about the character set there would
have been no problem in the HTML alternative-part).

The reason that VM got screwed up is that for all illegal characters
in HTML (ASCII NUL is illegal in all SGML) it (actually Emacs's web
browser, w3.el) checks against a list of common Microsoft-isms (like
smart quotes, in order to do something sensible with them) and
announces this to the console, which takes a lot of extra time. If I
wasn't running a debug version of XEmacs, I wouldn't have noticed,
probably.

--
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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