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[Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters]

|Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters <mertz at gnosis.cx> writes:
|> I just read a couple dozen 7-bit ASCII documents on c.l.py before
|> getting to Martin's 7-bit ASCII document arguing against the prevelance
|> of 7-bit ASCII documents (and I haven't even opened my favorite HTML
|> viewer for the day yet).

martin at v.loewis.de (Martin v. =?iso-8859-15?q?L=F6wis?=) wrote previously:
|http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/f/flat-ASCII.html
|RFC-822 message are not flat ASCII.
|But the news reader has done some rendering of the messages, no
|(e.g. header, body, it probably suppressed the Message-ID altogether)?
|this would indicate that they are not flat...

I don't run one of those sissy newsreaders that surpress all the headers
:-) (actually, there is a toggle to supress -some- of the headers, but
most still appear either way).

But that's a side point.  The messages I read a couple dozen of are the
BODIES of NNTP messages.  Y'know, the things that Martin and others
wrote in this thread (and in other threads); not the things their client
software slapped on.  By most any reasonable measure, Usenet messages
are plain (7-bit) ASCII, even though they have some special markup in
the mostly-automatic headers.

Likewise, if I write a .TXT document in glorious ASCII, then slap a
'<pre>...</pre>' at the beginning and end of the whole thing, it's still
pretty much an ASCII document.  Or if I put Python triple-quotes around
the whole document and store the text in a variable, it is still pretty
much an ASCII document stored in the variable (even though the source
code around it is structured).

Yours, Lulu...

P.S. There *are* gradual transitions.  My plain document contains a
little bit of markup.  Some special puntuation to emphasize words;
left-margin symbols to indicate quotation; a fairly conventional
structure for excerpting and attribution of previous remarks; smileys.
Other formats like reST add a bit more markup while still remaining
-almost ASCII-.

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