Re: Warning -- ASCII art and Netscape Messenger 5.0

On Mon, 08 Nov 1999 07:46:35 +0100, Ben Bucksch <new...@bucksch.org>
provoked the following text:

>> * show :) or :-) as a smiley face graphic (which could be awful for some
>>   ASCII art pictures).
>We will leave ":)" alone, we just change " :)", which should be more
>secure.

Why change usenet and e-mail traditions? And how about ":-)))", ";-)",
":-*" or "|-/"? Not to mention "@--\--\--"

Thinking up new emoticons is part of the fun of posting in any NG.

Just leave emoticons alone and save yourself a lot of programming and
headache and us a lot of angryness (angryness is not the right word, but i
can't think of another. Sorry).

If that argument can't convince you, take a look at MS Word, it also
changes emoticons into stupid smileys.

>> On the positive side, they are discussing ways of detecting when plain
>> text is ASCII art and when it isn't, so that even people who read
>> messages in a proportional font will see ASCII art in a fixed-width font.
>I will step into this. We still have no good rule to detect ASCII-art,
>that doesn't sound like "60% of ...". Can somebody give me a good *and*
>simple (easy to remember and figure out with just using the software)
>rule? It should catch ASCII-tables, but shouldn't trigger, if not
>appropriate.

It _could_ be done by requesting people posting ascii-art to precede their
art by some sort of tag like <ascii> </ascii>, but frankly, i don't think
ascii-artists would want to do that.

>Currently, we walk char-by-char through the message, an algorithm that
>honors that has better chances to be implemented. Of course, I can't
>even garanty, if such an detection will make it into Mozilla.

I'm not wild about the idea, but _if_ it makes it into Mozilla, please
make sure the ascii-art is being displayed in a fixed-pitch font.