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

[JKirkpatrick]

Thanks to Alex for the historical perspective and reassurance,
and to Richard for offering us to get HTML on the list. I vote
yes to HTML. 
Now no more worries about using quote marks.

Cheers, Joanna
 

-----Original Message-----
From: buddha-l-bounces at mailman.swcp.com
[mailto:buddha-l-bounces at mailman.swcp.com] On Behalf Of Richard
Hayes
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 8:22 PM
To: Buddhist discussion forum
Subject: [Buddha-l] Buddha-l settings [was] "Western Self, Asian
Other"

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







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