On Mon, Feb 23, 1998 at 02:25:07PM -0700, Edward Becerra wrote:

At 12:55 PM 2/23/98 -0600, Uchann@Aol.com wrote:

	An otherwise rather interesting fic, except for the fast that a) it was in 
HTML format, and b) It used HTML codes that even IE 3.02 didn't recognize.

	Uchann, please.. I know you probably wanted to make a nice looking fic with 
lots of lovely fonts and styles, but for the sake of people who don't have 
cutting edge hard/software, you need to convert your fics to standard ASCII 
text. Preferably the 7 bit (128 character set) ASCII text format.

	Some of those codes confused all the browsers I tried. The ’ code WAS 
obvious, given it's position in various contractions.. some fancy version of 
the right apostrophe. But the … one? I couldn't figure that one out 
on a bet.

… = Horizontal Ellipsis  (...), according to the HTML 4.0 specifications.

But maybe it's asking too much to expect the browser programmers to actually read
the specs...

(For the record, these two entities aren't recognized by Netscape Communicator,
either.)
 

	So please.. next post, no matter how much it pains you.. keep the HTML'ized 
version for your web page and make a TEXT-ONLY version for posting to the
list.

The post in question was a multipart/alternate message, so there _was_ a plain text 
version there -- it's just a matter of figuring out how to get your mailer to 
display it.  (my mailer displayed it by default)

I question using a multipart/alternate message to send both a plain text and an
HTML version to the list, however.  Seems like a waste of bandwidth to me.  The
fact that some mailers barf on this kind of thing only makes matters worse.
 

	Sorry to rant, but it IS frustrating.

Yes, agreed.

-- 

- Sean Connor (sec@frodo.com)

	Tao doesn't make a fuss, and gets things done.
	If only politicians were able to do this,
	all would be well by itself.

		-Tao te Ching, Verse 37