Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 11:56:54 +0100 From: nik@iii.co.uk To: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au>, Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: E-day problems: rtld-elf dlsym() broken? Message-ID: <19980902115654.A24205@iii.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <19980902185429.58373@welearn.com.au>; from Sue Blake on Wed, Sep 02, 1998 at 06:54:29PM %2B1000 References: <Pine.BSD.4.00.9809010729170.18315-200000@feldman.dyn.ml.org> <199809020322.WAA03118@detlev.UUCP> <19980902160634.G606@freebie.lemis.com> <19980902185429.58373@welearn.com.au>
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On Wed, Sep 02, 1998 at 06:54:29PM +1000, Sue Blake wrote: > > Any others? Any comments? > > Deal with lines >80 characters. Most seem to do this, but since we're > drawing up a list... it'd be sad to find one that didn't. The real > problem, of course, comes with the editor and quoting. > > I'm having difficulty talking people into keeping their lines short. > Everything else I get heavy about can be found in some RFC. For line > lengths, the RFC sets a maximum of 1000 characters. If they argue that > problems with lines more than 80 characters are the recipient's > software's fault, who's to say they're wrong? So bung it on the list. Some references that say they're wrong. N <URL:http://128.2.232.225/~julie/netiquette.html>; Line Width You will find that many mailers will allow you to type in more than eighty characters per line. However, this can create a real mess, because on the internet, everything is automatically wrapped to 80 lines or fewer. Thus, you get broken lines which are really hard to follow. For example, look at the following: It's often occurred to me that many people don't seem to under- stand the clear distinction between correlational variance and causal relationships. Now try imagining reading whole pages like that. If you don't set your mailers to under 80 charaters per line, this is how people will read your outgoing mail, and most of them will just delete it rather than bother. The internet is a great forum for communication, but we have to do what we can to communicate well on it otherwise things get ugly quite fast. <URL:http://www.fau.edu/rinaldi/net/elec.html>; * Limit line length to aproximately 65-70 characters and avoid control characters. <URL:http://www.hart.bbk.ac.uk/~trish/maponline/MAP07.html>; DON'T send lines longer than 70 characters. This is a kindness to folks with terminal-based mail editors or newsreaders. Some mail gateways truncate extra characters turning your deathless prose into gibberish. Some mail editor tools only SEEM to insert line breaks for you, but actually don't, so that every paragraph is one immense line. Learn what your mail editor does. <URL:http://w3.arl.mil/home/netiquette/rfc18552.html>; - Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line with a carriage return. <URL:http://www.ses.com/~joe/Netiquette.html>; Be aware that other people's machines may not operate the same way as yours does. Keep the following precautions in mind: Except for program source code, keep your lines under 80 characters, and under 72 if possible. For example, a terminal with an autowrap feature makes output on a simple line editor appear as if a carriage return has been inserted at the 80th character; a new line seems to have started when it actually hasn't. Be sure your editor is really inserting carriage returns, or insert them manually when typing. Most special control characters do not work for most readers. In fact, the tab and space characters are about the only ones you can be sure work consistently, and tabs aren't always the same from machine to machine. Pictures and diagrams should not use embedded tabs. Submissions in all upper case or all lower case are difficult to read. <URL:http://www.landfield.com/faqs/usenet/primer/part1/>; Limit Line Length and Avoid Control Characters. Try to keep your text in a generic format. Many (if not most) of the people reading Usenet do so from 80 column terminals or from workstations with 80 column terminal windows. Try to keep your lines of text to less than 80 characters for optimal readability. If people quote part of your article in a followup, short lines will probably show up better, too. Also realize that there are many, many different forms of terminals in use. If you enter special control characters in your message, it may result in your message being unreadable on some terminal types; a character sequence that causes reverse video on your screen may result in a keyboard lock and graphics mode on someone else's terminal. You should also try to avoid the use of tabs, too, since they may also be interpreted differently on terminals other than your own. -- --+==[ Nik Clayton becomes Just Another Perl Contractor in 10 days. ]==+-- She's still dead. Deal with it. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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