lynx-dev Control characters in news (was Re: Posted message has no text error message)

[Michael Warner]

On or about 05 Feb, 2000, Henry Nelson
<address@hidden> wrote:

> >  I that if somebody wants to send escape sequences, this
> > person will use other tools (probably perl) rather than
> > invoking external editor from lynx manually and typing
> > something wrong there. Also, good newsreader won't send raw
> > escape
>
> It's not that they "want," it's that they may carelessly or
> inadvertently send escape or control sequences; at times with
> disastrous effects on the receiving end.  (I know that if I
> receive certain one-byte kana in news, sometimes it locks up my
> terminal so that the only way out is to shut down the terminal
> emulation program.)

I don't have an opinion either way, but I can think of a couple,
at least "pseudo-legitimate", control characters that someone
might send intentionally.  It used to be (maybe still is) sort of
a convention to use a "^L" as a "spoiler char" in news postings.
In email (not sure about news) there's the "text/enriched" thing
(X^HX for bold, _^HX for underline).  Are those problematic for
lynx?

In a *.html file, the control chars seem to be ignored entirely
-- X^HX displayed as "XX", _^HX as "_X, ^L not displayed at
all.  In a news posting using 2.8rel2 (system copy, I didn't
compile news into mine) lynx sends the control chars -- they work
as intended viewed with trn -- and renders the enriched/text
sequences without the doubled letters *and* without any bolding
or underlining.  The "control-L" is rendered as "^L", but has no
effect.

I doubt if any of that is particularly relevant, but I'm so
pleased to be sending email with Subject: headers again that I
thought I'd go ahead and comment. :)
 
-- 
Michael Warner
<address@hidden>