Benno Schulenberg schreef: > Holly Bostick wrote: > >>What I meant to say was: >> >>>">sys-kernel-2.4.28-r9" >> >>there should be a 'greater-than" sign in fron of the package name, > > > There was a greater-than for me, in KMail, also in your first mail. > Apparently Thunderbird hides it from you. But it should do that > only for ">From " and nothing else. Bug in TB? > > Benno
Yes and no-- the ">" character is the symbol used to distinguish quotes from regular text-- and Thunderbird converts this character to a colored vertical line, so that quoted text looks like this when displayed: | here is my quoted text | and here is some more. I don't have an issue with this behaviour in general (in fact, I like the way quoted text is signified under normal circumstances). The problem is that, in this particular case, the ">" character was the first non-whitespace character in the line, and T-Bird had no way of knowing that it was not intended to represent a traditional quote signifier, but was meant to remain itself. That is, of course, the whole point of escape characters; to tell the program in question that a character it has a standard meaning for should in this particular case not be "translated" to that meaning, but is meant to be "just itself". The situation happens very rarely to me, but it's 'obvious' enough (especially to programmers and scripters, who use escape characters all the time) that I'm sure there must be some workaround for it for Thunderbird (since this is Thunderbird-specific behaviour, which I have noticed in the past, as well as the fact that KMail, for example, does not do this); I just don't know what it is. If there isn't, that *would* be a bug. I'll check MozillaZine and Google later.... Mozdev seems to like to hide this stuff. If you've ever tried to find the list of command-line switches for Netscape/Moz/Firefox on the Internet, you'll know exactly what I mean. Holly -- [email protected] mailing list
