On 30/01/2013 16:54, Huge wrote:
On 2013-01-30, John Williamson wrote:
Paul D Smith wrote:
"John Williamson" wrote in message
...
Paul D Smith wrote:
"John Rumm" wrote in message
o.uk...
On 30/01/2013 12:51, Paul D Smith wrote:
nothing!
(if you post under someone else's signature line, most news software
will trim off your post completely when replying)
That's quite amusing. I wonder how they figure out what a signature
line is? As someone who writes software for a living I'm always
amused to see new ways for software authors have helpfully shot
themselves in the foot. As far as I am aware (and "News" is not my
field so I'm ready to be additionally educated) a News item is simply
text, with no implied interpretation of any part of the item.
A standards compliant newsreader looks for a line in the body of the
post which contains only "-- (line feed)" (ASCII codes
-,-, ,�A, if I've read the table correctly. ). It then
assumes that any lines after this are a signature. It will then,
according to user preference or possibly as hard coded, either strip
these lines from the reply when composing, or ignore it.
John, can you indicate the RFC? I've not managed to find an RFC which
interprets the body in any way.
I haven't checked in the RFCs. It's just the way I understand that this
is done both by custom and usage.
There's an article in Wikipedia:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3
And:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt
4.3. Usenet Signature Convention
There is a long-standing convention in Usenet news which also
commonly appears in Internet mail of using "-- " as the separator
line between the body and the signature of a message. When
generating a Format=Flowed message containing a Usenet-style
separator before the signature, the separator line is sent as-is.
This is a special case; an (optionally quoted or quoted and stuffed)
line consisting of DASH DASH SP is neither fixed nor flowed.
--
Rod