I'm catching up on old email. Sorry if this has already been addressed. > Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 13:03:20 -0400 > From: Steven Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> The key is to define user fields in such a way that they can be safely > ignored by computer programs trying to parse the file I think this is one of the more important points in this discussion. I think ABC needs this. In HTML, anything in <> is a command. Any command the browser doesn't understand gets ignored. While HTML isn't a perfect system, it is nice to have a simple method of communicating to the program, "This is a command. Interpret it if you can; otherwise ignore everything up to the end-of-command delimiter." The !...! commands, whether we like them or not, work this way. Regardles of whether the syntax ends up being !...!, +...+ or whatever, the standard could (and IMO should) specify that new fields that are not part of the standard must be enclosed between appropriate delimiters, so that software that doesn't know how to interpret these fields can easily determine the extent of what it needs to ignore. Jeff To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
