At 12:41 PM 6/12/2002 -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: >Mia McDavid <mia_mcdavid at attbi.com> writes on 12 June 2002 at 10:14:29 -0500 > > DDB said: > > Formfeed is a standard ASCII character that means advance to the next > > page. If the program doesn't, that sounds pretty broken to me. > > I'm confused. Formfeed, I thought, was a printer command. I've never > > seen an email program that had actual "pages"; word processors do, but > > not email. What am I missing. >Every mail and news viewing program I know divides long messages into >pages. Most often, the space bar advances to the next page. It's not really a division into pages, though. Sure, you can go a screen down. But you can also go a line down, or three lines down, by using the arrow keys or the mouse wheel-- and then go a screen down from there, which will give you a "page" starting and ending at different lines. The screen size varies with the size of the window as well-- it could be five lines high, or fifty-five, and can be changed with a click-and-drag. I'm sure that you could implement something along the lines of the formfeed character inserting as many lines as the current window size, or some standard number of lines like 25, but it doesn't seem to be commonly done. (Is one of these how gnus handles formfeed in different sized X windows?) Regardless of whether mail programs could or should implement the formfeed character in some way, in practice they mostly don't. This isn't just the usual case of Microsoft ignoring net standards-- it seems to be the case across operating systems and mail programs from different sources. At some point, a standard becomes pretty theoretical if it's only implemented in a minority of the available software. If we're going to have some sort of spoiler protection, it should be one that works or can work for most of the list members. I've even given up using Control-L on Usenet in favor of inserting whitespace. There are just too many programs-- not just OE-- that ignore it. (Though I hadn't know that there are e-mail programs that eat whitespace.) Mike