neumann@csl.sri.com
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2018 11:11:14 PST
- BEGIN RANT -
OK, RISKS readers, ``I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more.'' I'm really fed up with trying to edit what some of you send me, trying to produce nice clean readable issues of RISKS, without errors. I'm not giving up on putting out RISKS issues, but the time it takes to put out each issue has recently been escalating. Please don't bother to complain about characters that are garbled. It's wasting your time. I'm not perfect.
From the very early RISKS issues in 1985, I have expressed a desire to
receive messages with ASCII characters; later on, I made a plea to
completely avoid attachments in Word, pdf, html, or even encoded ASCII. I
process RISKS e-mail with an archaic ASCII-happy mail system, because it
hugely simplifies my ability to delete more than 80% of the incoming mail
sight unseen (lots of spam), and then trying to cull out and lightly edit
your *good* contributions. Nevertheless, I still get smart quotes and smart
apostrophes from Mac users, encodings of spaces as underscores (or some
weird unprintable character) and equal signs from Windows systems that
insist on encoding certain ASCII characters as non-ascii characters, rampant
=E2=80 encodings, long lines split with an equal sign at the end of each
line, non-ASCII From: addresses (e.g., from Mateo), copies of entire RISKS
issues as attachments when you are responding to an item in a previous
issue, the entire ASCII text of your would-be contributions completely
duplicated in horribly fulsome html, rampant extra junk appended (from
Richard Stein *), URLs that come out with %3A%2F%2F encodings, and more.
UTF-8 might help a little, but is primarily useful for attachments that use
it consistently. Then, for your ease of reading, I try to unscramble overly
long URLs and verify my attempts at creating shorter ones, and remove all
the extra cruft created by Office-365-safelinks URL enscramblings that
evidently offer no real security anyway. Furthermore, I do not have time to
cope with alternative approaches, such as your putting jpeg files on your
website for me to view with a browser.
Perhaps needless to say, I would greatly appreciate if you can spend just a
few more moments in your submissions to have a little more concern for my
own well-being. ASCII is ASCII, and emacs is emacs, and I will remain a
troglodyte in order to continue to moderate RISKS for you. I am sorry that
I do not readily handle all of your special characters. Clearly, if RISKS
had to deal with submissions in Cyrillic, Kanji, Farsi, Arabic or whatever,
I would have to do things very differently -- or simply completely give up
running a seriously moderated digested new group (where you can create your
own undigestifier if you prefer). However, if you think you have a better
solution, please let me know. THANKS in advance for your consideration.
- END RANT -
[* Footnote from each of Richard Stein's contributions in this issue:
MDAwMDAwMCAgIGggICB0ICAgdCAgIHAgICBzICAgOiAgIC8gICAvICAgdyAgIHcgICB3ICAg ...
ad finitum -- for 77 lines of similar meaningless garbage.
PGN]
Let's see who gags on this issue, where I have intentionally left in
a few outliers.