Re: About rendering ascii code in a .txt medium

Pete Casso (pet...@sympatico.ca) wrote:
 [big snip]
: Some time ago, Microsoft and working groups of the IETF (Internet Engineering
: Task Force) have therefore published recommendedations against the use of
: ascii pics on the Internet. But what they (and the ascii community) forget, is
: that it is EASY to protect ascii pics by including the above typographical
: parameters as part and parcel of the pics, say, in the form of html tags. This
: would also allow pics generated within aol to be correctly viewed in the
: outside world and vice versa ... 

Funny. I haven't heard of any such recommendation by the IETF, even though
one could assume that such an event would've been noticed and discussed in
this NG. If one does exist, I apologize for my ignorance, but I wonder if
you might've meant the W3C (or was it the WDG, I forget) recommendation
against using ascii art in web pages.

If you did, you couldn't have put it more out of context, as the
recommendation was specifically targeted against embedding ascii art in
HTML, on the grounds that it is incompatible with non-textual user agents
such as talking browsers, and there is currently no practical way of
including an alternative representation for those. This is in fact a
special case of the general rule of keeping style and layout information
(which ascii art like all preformatted text is all about) outside HTML.

And to avoid a pointless thread, I'd like to note that the recommendation
was intended against using ascii art for navigation (such as
<a href="../">&lt;--</a>) or to present other information which should be
accessible to everyone (including blind people), not against presenting
ascii art for its own sake on the web.

-- 
 .    _, .. j u s t.  h o w l.i n g   i n  .t h e   n.i g h t .. ._,   .
,    )''        .       /\_    .     '     ,/\   .          ,    ``(  ,
_\__/ |__.'\._______,--;_'_`-.___,.______,/_,_`.__,-.__'__,/`-._,_| \____
 ,_f_)\. Ilmari Karonen  ilt...@sci.fi  http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/  /(_|_,.

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