On 2019-04-23 20:30:09 +0000, Maurice Kinal -> Alan Ianson said:

> Hey Alan!
> 
>  AI> It would be best if we moved to UTF-8 natively but that could get
>  AI> messy
> 
> There is an understatement if I've ever seen one.  So far I have only seen
one
> web based BBS that can get the word wrapping right and it is in Russia.
> Others I've seen get the characters correctly but then count them as bytes
> instead of characters so that word wrapping will be thrown off.  Add to that
> the fact that ansi BBSes cannot count higher than 80 and it gets even
messier
> .... nevermind smart devices that cannot even count anywhere near 80
> characters.

LMAO! Sad but true...

> If you were asking me, and I know that you weren't, the two digit year is a
> MUCH bigger issue and given it has been roughly 17 years since it was
declared
> obsolete I don't hold out much faith in ANYTHING ever being fixed in Fidonet
> ... unless of course you're like me and totally take advantage of FTN
> crippleware and ignore the obvious weaknesses such as datetime stamps, CHRS
> and UTC offset kludges, etc.  Also while I am ranting, all the crappy binary
> data in headers, especially the pktHeader which are nothing but wasted byes.

Well, I am attacking it the other way around ... I am using 
TRichEdit.com's Editor component - which is UTF8 only now. And working 
on Character sets, without fully understanding the variances. But, I am 
reading, and asking. ;-)

Per the PKT header(s), I do not mind them - my challenge was these 
lines have ^a kludge markers, these lines don't, then the end has 
^aPATH. To me, it would be best if all the kludge lines, including 
tear, origin, seen, path all preface the text... and the text simply 
ends with a null ^@. Parsing would be a snap, tossers would be 
lightning fast, ridiculously easy to code. Yeah, we could do it like 
Email and NNTP headers vs bodies - but, then it wouldn't be fidonet, it 
would be Internet. ;-)

The challange is all of the obsolete binaries that are still 
online/involved. I spent the past year building FMTP (Fidonet Mail 
Transport Protocol), a hybrid of SMTP/NNTP as far as 
communication/commands - even to the point that a BBS would simply use 
the FMTP server as their local message base. Spoke with a few sysops, 
and noone wanted to give up having the messages on their local system. 
Even when I pointed out, it would be 100% cloud based backend on public 
CDN networks... e.g. No one in control, the 6 FMTP server would do 
real-time replication of posts and the messages could be access as pull 
down on demand (so it could be displayed in a full-screen viewer, or a 
text based stream, or a web forum... i have not given up, just put it 
on the back burner for now...

PS. Do you know in CP850/CP855 - the highbit characters for drawing 
boxes - is it the double line or single line version that is missing 
elements? (Somewhere I read, one of these two does not support all of 
the edges/corners for drawing boxes. However, both Wiki pages for them 
all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_850
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_855

I know storing everything in CP437 and trying to translate to 850, 855 
is not 1 to 1. And in Linux, I can store everything is UTF8 and be done 
with it. I have learned that the first 3 bytes help me know what I am 
dealing with - even in source code:

If Copy(Ws,1,3)=#239#187#191 then ... it's UTF8 encoded (be it message, 
source, web, text file).

Not sure if everyone's Linux does that - but every machine I have 
contains those 3 bytes its a UTF8 stream.

(Still learning)
-- 
.. Ozz Nixon
... Author ExchangeBBS (suite)
.... Since 1983 BBS Developer

--- ExchangeBBS NNTP Server v3.1/Linux64
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