In article <407d86f4@news.povray.org> , Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:

> Just like if you said "Hey, this is japanese" and your newsreader tried
> displaying japanese characters instead of the english you typed, because
> it couldn't decode it and guess it's english.

Guess what, that is what one really has to do.  If you find a header you
don't know, you have little choice but to ignore it.

> Trying to compensate for people who say "Hey, this is an image" and then
> attaching an .exe is where you get many of your viruses.

No, users opening executable attachments from unknown sources on the
internet will eventually have to learn more about Darwinism ;-)

> In other words, "two wrongs don't make a right."  Just because you have
> many newsreaders that compensate for brokenness doesn't mean it isn't
> broken, and the newsreaders that don't compensate for your broken posts
> aren't broken either.

There is no standard for Usenet attachments.  Remember that MIME standards
for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.  It is common these days, yes, as
it uuencoded attachments you match by searching for a magic string ("begin")
followed by what looks like Unix file attributes and a filename thingy.

> I am using 1.6 mozilla. Since I just upgraded maybe a month ago, I don't
> think that's the problem. If you post a uuencoded file inside a
> mime-complient header that claims it's not uuencoded, then mozilla does
> (and always did, and *should*) show it as plain text, just how the
> sender said.

No, you are misunderstanding how decoding Usenet messages has to be done.
The fact that you observe that most messages you find are decoded correctly
is that there are more common formats and their decoding is tested better.
However, this certainly does not say those messages are encoded correctly at
all.  If you are looking for correctly encoded Usenet messages with
attachments, you cannot find any because Usenet attachments have never been
fully standardised.  This is the main problem when you have to decode them,
and that is why newsreaders have to eat absolutely every junk and still try
to make something meaningful out of it.  Believe me, I have had to deal with
message formats more than I would like to - getting the web news view to
decode as many messages as it does the way it does (with finite information,
without any message lookahead) is far from trivial and you quickly figure
out that what is considered common or "almost standard" has no meaning for
newsreaders.

BTW, this is not unique to the newsreaders you have.  Google needs to apply
even more tricks to decode ever more uncommon plain content formats and to
filter out attachments of all kinds correctly.  Of course, fi you look very
close, you will notice even they cannot decode everything correctly.

Of course, as I said, if too many newsreaders don't support the current
format the web view uses to post attachments, I will switch to MIME
multipart messages.  However, those are much more work to encode is you need
to support a preview and edit of such messages (which the webview does).

    Thorsten

PS: Base 64 uuencoding was specified in some mid-1990s POSIX update for
standard commnad-line tools.  For example GNU uudecode supports it.

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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