[RFC 822 says there's no net-wide standard HTAB size] On Tue, Jan 19, 1999 at 04:09:01PM -0500, Avery Pennarun wrote: > That's what makes it a "de-facto" standard.
No, that does not make it a standard of any kind - in fact, it suggests that not even a de facto standard existed. A de facto standard is, by definition, a universally accepted convention which does not have the weight of a de jure standard. If a de facto, network-wide definition for a tab size were available in the early 1980's, don't you thing the RFC 822 authors would have codified it in RFC 822 as a part of the de jure standard? The fact that they didn't, suggests that no de facto standard was available. > Unfortunately, no standards, even de-facto ones, are universally > implemented because there are people who (often rightly) believe > that they're junk. Oh? When there are true standards, either de facto or de jure, usually /everyone/ who wants to interface with the universe implements the standard. However, if they think a standard is junk, they also implement a better system, as an /alternative/ to the standard. > Yay for ^H versus DEL :) This is different. ^H versus DEL has no relevance to the problem of interfacing with the universe. Tab size has, as this discussion shows. Antti-Juhani -- %%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % [EMAIL PROTECTED] % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%% EMACS, n.: Emacs May Allow Customised Screwups (unknown origin)