[H-GEN] Plain Text and Unix Philosophy

[Andrae Muys]

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On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Tony Bilbrough wrote:

> it's this 
> "80 column boundaries and plain text restrictions"
> 
> Just what does it mean and how does one set it up?
> Or is this a 'silly old twit' sort of question?
> 

The 80 columns has already been discussed in subsequent emails, so I will
let those replies stand with no more then a 'me too'.

OTOH, the "plain text restrictions"[sic] are probably more important to
understand as netiquette has adopted it directly from the Unix Philosophy.  
It's this double whammy that makes HTML email to a Unix mailing list such
a touchy issue.  

<aside>
While in general (I am personally aware of a couple of rare
counter-examples) sending HTML email to any email list can be considered
rude, to send an email to a Unix mailing list, the nature of which
violates one of the fundamental tenets of the unix design philosophy, may
cause offense.

Now the above paragraph is border-line off-charter for H-GEN, so if you
want to discuss it in any way please move the discussion to H-CHAT, or
preferably off-list.  Actually better yet, just grab me at the next humbug
meeting and we can discuss it then (the higher bandwidth of f-t-f will
probably reduce mis-understanding).
</aside>

I am aware that there may be a number of members on this list who may not
even be aware there is a "Unix Philosophy".  Like most philosophies there
are disputed boundary cases, but a recognised core set of values.  An
understanding of these values is an essential part of making the best use
of a Linux/BSD/Un*x OS (please note I didn't say "good use", but rather
"best use" as in fullest, most complete, most flexible, most efficient
etc.)

A quick google search finds the following links to start with:

http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Simon.Dobson/teaching/unix-philosophy.html

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/taoup/chapter1.html

http://www.ai.mit.edu/docs/articles/good-news/subsection3.2.1.html

http://www.jammed.com/~jwa/Misc/scoville_unix_as_literature.txt

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

I encourage you to read at least the first link, it's a brief summary of
19 core tenets that are widely regarded as describing the unix philosophy.

However the one paragraph summary belongs to Doug MacIlroy:

This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it
well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text
streams, because that is a universal interface. 

Consider your email as a text-stream to be processed by an text processing
tool and you will understand the request that email be kept to plain
text.  In the degenerate case this tool is just your email reader, but it
may also be a mail filter, a digest tool, an archival tool, a text search
tool, and that's just the obvious ones[0].

Andrae Muys

[0] Non-obvious might include Hamming code generator, Eliza-style
conversational AI, auto-faq generator, no one person can possibly imagine
all the possible uses for an email message :), that's the point.  Plain
text provides a universal medium to these miriad of different tools/uses.

--
Andrae Muys            
amuys at contal.net.au  ...most likely other e-mail programs like Eudora
Senior Engineer        are not designed to enable virus replication.
IDMS International        Found in Virus FAQ at http://www.microsoft.com


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