Re: archiving

[cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano)]

Reply to note from jr_fox@xxxxxxxx Sun, 01 Oct 2000 17:32:32 -
0800

-> In regard to transmitting a heavily formatted Xy-document
-> intact, what I've said about archiving still holds. However,
-> there is an alternate method of changing all the *live*
-> guillemots (embedded formatting triangles) into ordinary,
-> inactive, displayable chevrons at this end, and then using
-> another Xy-routine at the other end to change them back. This
-> would make the file transmittable as 100% pure-ASCII text.

Actually, not. Because "inactive, displayable chevrons" in Xy are
3-byte characters, the first byte of which is Ascii-255, which, of
course, has a significant 8th bit. Even if you did change all
guillemets to some 7-bit Ascii string (e.g., =AE and =AF), there's
still the problem of all the other high-order (127-254) and low-
order (0-31) Ascii chars that a formatted document or XPL PM might
contain. So you really do need a comprehensive method to encode Xy
files before dispatch, and to decode them upon receipt -- typically,
the base64 method used in MIME attachments or, also common, quoted-
printable to encode the message itself.

Be that as it may, I suggest we wait for some indication from Morris
that he's read and understood the various responses to his query,
and that they were, well, responsive. Because I'm not sure, when he
says "archiving", that he really means archiving. In my earlier
post, I assumed that he meant encoding/decoding to prevent file
corruption during transport. I could be wrong.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/