--------
Laura writes:
| Jack> | My original had:
| Jack> | > Z:Jack Campin <www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/>, Sep 2000
|
| John> It's indeed annoying when people strip out attribution. One reason
| John> this might be done is that a lot of people object to having their
| John> email address or URL included in others' files. I've gotten a few
| John> requests to remove email addresses and/or URLs from some of my online
| John> tunes, which I've generally done, though I don't like it.
|
| I understand about the email, but why have a website if you don't want
| people to be able to get to it? I would never put someone's email on
| my site without their permission, but I tend to assume that relevant
| pointers to a site would be welcome without asking. Certainly many
| people point to my site without asking or telling me.
Yeah; maybe I should revisit the idea of embedding the original URL
in ABC returned by the Tune Finder. It does seem that anything
reading a file from the Web should be prepared to handle at least the
standard line terminator, which is just LF. It shouldn't be too hard
to replace whatever is in the file with an LF. I do like the idea of
including such attribution, so recipients of a single tune can easily
find the tune's source. We did have a discussion some time back that
seems to have concluded that an F header line was the best way to
include this information.
What I've tried to do in the past is to preserve whatever terminators
the file contained. This turns out to be tricky, in part because a
lot of files come with mixed styles of terminators. I suspect that
this is due to the web server and/or a CGI script on the server side.
But there is probably no good reason to propogate such confusion. I
could do my tiny bit for standardization by trimming away trailing
white space, up to CR and/or LF, and replacing it all with a single
LF char.
One thing I do keep expecting is to find some ABC on a VMS machine,
where they like to use LFCR as the line terminator. The algorithm for
matching any of CR, LF, CRLF or LFCR correctly without introducing
spurious blank lines is a bit tricky. If it weren't for Apple, you
could just match on LF and treat CR as white space (as the ANSI spec
says). But the existence of system that use just CR as a terminator
throws a monkey wrench into that scheme.
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