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Re: [Phys-l] test : fancy symbols, utf-8 encoding



On Feb 13, 2006, at 2:29 AM, John Denker wrote:


. . . I imagine the "march of progress" cartoon will look something
like this:

0) Plain ascii text.
1) Text with a few fancy characters, encoded as utf-8 and/or as
html character-entities.
2) Unrestricted HTML (with formatting directives, not just
individual character entities).
3) Attachments.

Level (2) is open to abuse: For example, somebody might choose
to post messages using very large characters (ten inches high
or larger) ... perhaps because they look better on his screen,
or perhaps just to make a point. I don't want to read such
things. Also there's lots of potential nastiness associated
with cookies, javascript, included images, et cetera.

Level (3) is quite beyond the pale for the forseeable future.
It carries infinite risk of abuse, including viruses, worms,
and other wildlife.

For that matter, it is an open question as to whether we are
ready for level (1) ... hence the recent test messages.

In *any* case, one way to deal with things that can't be
represented in plain text is to put them on the web in some
standard, portable format (such as html, png, or pdf) and
put a link in a message to the list. This is far from
perfect, but better than nothing, i.e. better than being
rigorously restricted to plain text only.

I was not aware that level 2 (using html tags) is available. Let me verify this. Next paragraph contains tags used to create web pages. I hope everybody will see bold, red and underlined words.

<center><B>This is a text with html tags.</B> </center>
<P>
The above four words should be centered and in bold. <font color="red">This sentence should be in red. </font> <u>And this sentence should be underlined. </u>

Ludwik Kowalski
Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good.