[Buddha-l] Buddha-l settings [was] "Western Self, Asian Other"

[Richard Hayes]

On Dec 30, 2009, at 7:51 PM, Alex Wilding wrote:

> I think these things got born in the days when just over 100 ASCII
> characters was all we could use on the net. The habit grew up of marking the
> start and end of *bold text* with asterisks, the start and end of
> _underlined text_ with underscores and so on. In fact some formatters now
> will even take the things I just wrote and display them as genuinely bold
> and underlined words.

Sort of makes one nostalgic for the pre-Unicode days, when feverish debates broke out about Naagaarjuna and Candrakiirti. I confess that I now prefer Nāgārjuna to Naagaarjuna.

> I believe single and double quotes are simple and safe from virtually all
> formatting tricks.

I believe you are right, although there are word processors that automatically replace straight-up quotation marks with so-called 'smart quotes'. I am not sure whether there are e-mail programs that do the same thing. If so, they would probably replace straight-up quotation marks with Unicode characters that virtually all e-mail programs can display.

On the matter of encoding, Buddha-l is currently set up to convert all HTML-coded messages to plain text. I believe this used to be done for two reasons. 1) Malicious code can be hidden in HTML tags, and 2) mark-up codes take up much more space than plain-ASCII or Unicode-enriched plain text. It is possible to override this restraint, thereby allowing HTML (sometimes called "rich text" or "rich formatting") to go through. I am of two minds about doing this. On the positive side, rich-text formatting allows for italics and bold letters and even indentation. All of those features make a message more aesthetically pleasing and easier to read (or so I think). 

On the negative side are the two matters I already mentioned: storage space and possible malicious coding. These days, I think storage space is less of a constraint than it used to be; memory is much cheaper than it used to be. (Dr Peavler, you may have something to say about buddha-l storage quotas and their costs.) As for the malicious coding, I think most junk filters can detect it and destroy offensive messages.

If you have any thoughts on whether you'd like to see rich-text formatting enabled, please communicate them to the usual suspects (that is, me or Peavler). It might be worth knowing that even if HTML code were allowed to be sent to subscribers, individual subscribers who wanted buddha-l to be delivered to them only in plain text could choose that option. 

Richard
rhayes at unm.edu