"Dan" == Dan Mick <dmick@utopia.West.Sun.COM> writes:
Dan> Why a garbage message? Why not just a (potentially) garbage
Dan> footer?Well, if it garbles HTML, it's going to hose our web interface. This is very possible with the Asian double-byte 7-bit encodings which are rife with random usage of octets like <, ", etc.
Also, some MUAs (think Emacs RMail, but also Outhouse Abcess) autodetect the encoding of the message buffer, usually based on the first 3000-4000 characters. Very long messages would be OK, but typical messages would have the confusing footer within that space. I really can't predict what Abcess would do with that (although it's quite good at generating that kind of stuff itself, Microsoft Unicode BOM followed by ASCII HTML markup intermixed with Unicode P?CDATA, for one egregious example of a beta version ;-).
Recently things have gotten better but when I first got to Japan I got to the point where I could read my boss's name and the name of the department in both base64 and raw bytes. Alphanumerics are easy; the double byte versions are #1, #2, ..., #A, .... ;-) So bogus encodings are no joke on this side of the big blue puddle.
For more information, Jukka Korpela's page is quite good, there must be an intro or seven there, and you don't even need to read Finnish!
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
-- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.