Re: lynx-dev Posted message has no text error message

[Henry Nelson]

>  I that if somebody wants to send escape sequences, this person will use other
> tools (probably perl) rather than invoking external editor from lynx manually
> and typing something wrong there. Also, good newsreader won't send raw escape

It's not that they "want," it's that they may carelessly or inadvertently
send escape or control sequences; at times with disastrous effects on the
receiving end.  (I know that if I receive certain one-byte kana in news,
sometimes it locks up my terminal so that the only way out is to shut down
the terminal emulation program.)

>  So, I think there is nothing of real concern here - it's better to fix the
> bug in that way it's done, rather than doing what idealized thinking suggests.
 
Again, I have to disagree with you vehemently.  You have been on the list
long enough now to know that Lynx has a rather foul name when it comes to
it's news module.  There are some news buffs who have severely criticized
Lynx for it's poor news handling and recommend that the news portion be
stripped from Lynx.  We leave it in because it's convenient and already
there; anyway, it's not as bad as some would make it out.

Making it even more less-than-ideal won't help matters, and in particular
could harm Lynx's reputation.  Just because Lynx isn't a news agent per se
doesn't mean that anything goes.  It should strive to be as compliant as
possible if it is going to stay.

> receiving side) - this means that 'isgraph' test is useless. The only
> check to be applied by lynx should be to insure that message sent is
> non-empty (and it uses "message has no content" message currently!), rather
> than trying to filter out escape sequences, IMO.

This exactly is where I admit I do not have enough knowledge to argue.
>From my layman's perspective, however, having a news agent that blindly
will allow the user to send escape sequences that could completely confuse
the receiver's terminal seems wrong.  Although I sent a message with only
euc-jp to see if the phenomenon was real, I also know that that is not the
correct way to post messages in Japanese.  Since Lynx does not convert to
safe encoding (way beyond Lynx's capabilities, and doubtful that such
capability should be included), it is up to the user to manually convert.
Since Lynx cannot do the conversion, I think it should do the next best
thing, i.e., it _should_ indicate to the user that the "message has no" *
ascii/terminal safe * "content."  Granted it would be much friendlier if
Lynx were to keep the message around so that someone who forgot to do the
conversion of multi-byte characters wouldn't have to retype the whole thing
again.  (But again, Lynx isn't a real news agent.)

To use my personal example, if I convert the content to ISO-2022-JP, I
have no problem whatsoever in posting with Lynx.  So actually, Lynx is
doing everyone a favor by forcing me to use proper encoding rather than
euc-jp or shift-jis which someone might not be able to read, or worse,
force someone's terminal to freeze up.

__Henry