At 10:30 AM 2/1/2001 -0800, Daniel wrote:
>My mailer, Pegasus for Windows, just showed it as a plain message. It is a
>MIME aware reader, but didn't seem to be aware enough to recognize the
>mime in that message. (or it was a true mime, and was silent :-0)
Ditto for Eudora Light.
Andrew wrote yesterday, in reply to my objections:
>you're objecting to stuff which has been in widespread use for a very
>long time....
Which in no way means that it should not be the basis of objection. Does
the RFC state why 30 hyphens were needed? Bad design choices remain bad
design choices forever, and when they're written into an RFC, the only
thing saving us from them is the non-application of that RFC.
The central purpose of the RFC, as I see it, is to provide a format for
digest messages- that is multiple messages issued in digest form- so that a
mail reader may treat them as a group of messages instead of a single
message. Even in a non-MIME mailreader, such digests are hardly more
unreadable than a text file containing a list of messages and headers. So I
therefore have no objection to the application of the RFC to digest messages.
My argument is that an FAQ is not a digest message because it consists of a
single message containing multiple sections (which may be questions, or may
be groups of sections or questions). A lot of FAQs are not formatted as a
linear question (Subject) and answer (body) session, they are formatted as
readable information, usually using questions as the headings, but also
including other groupings to allow people (not mailreaders) to browse the
questions more rapidly. The adherence to the RFC makes any attempt to allow
an FAQ to be hierarchial or flow for a human reader extremely difficult, if
not impossible.
That is my argument. You don't have to agree, but I would appreciate it if
you weren't so condescending in the future. I would never tell you or
anyone on this list to read the introduction to "*.answers". We are
supposed to be FAQ maintainers, and I would suggest the contents of that
document are required knowledge.
-- Archer http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/6413/End.
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