After struggling through the forest of extraneous Equals
signs, seemingly random digits and other junk, i barely
deciphered that this was the notice of someone's passing. It was
unusually replete with gibberish so I looked up richtext in
wikipedia as we have seen a number of messages on this list
containing binary garbage.
When the characters arrive from the list, they really
are what they appear to be,. Every =20 and so forth truly
contain the Equals sign followed by two ordinary ascii digits
such as 20 or some other pair of numbers.
What this is is an attempt by the mailer list software
to translate 8-bit characters in to a code that, if paired with
the right text reader, could turn them back in to the 8-bit
character that was originally sent.
Since =20 is about as common as pimples, I began to
check it out. As someone already pointed out, 20 is a space. 20
is actually a hex 20. The decimal number for a white space is 32
and the character that causes us to see =20 is 128 decimal bits
higher on the chart so its decimal number is 128+32 or 160. On
the ascii chart, that character is listed as a "non-breaking
space." A text editor might stick that in if the space might
otherwise break a line. I really don't completely know without
further research, but the point is that it is some kind of space
but not a normal one.
All this trash we see is 8-bit data that is designed to
produce certain normal characters but also cause whatever is
reading those data to behave in a certain manner such as do not
break the line, etc.
I looked up richtext on wikipedia and surprise! surprise!
it was developed by Microsoft starting in the late eighties and
is now being discontinued but, like plastic cups and garbage
bags, it will probably out live us in land fills.
The mailing list software is not deficient except that
it would be nice if it just ignored richtext totally, but I have
seen this richtext accent on other lists so the only real fix
is to just turn it off. It's not doing any good on mailing lists
at all.
Many lists ban binary attachments and html mail and only
allow plain ascii text since not everybody out there can read
proprietary formats which is what richtext is.
If you don't have control over your mailer settings,
find somebody who does and raise cane until it gets fixed. It is
broken and that is all there is to say.
Microsoft's idea of Heaven on Earth is to create
something that vaguely resembles existing technology but doesn't
work properly with anybody else's product so it's like
kudzu. It spreads everywhere, chokes out everything else and
will be with us for the foreseeable future.
In truth, after Microsoft came up with richtext,
Macintosh was one of the first to let you output documents in it
so MS had some help spreading this scourge.
I know. I should have a positive attitude. I positively
hate decoding messages that should just read normally.
Martin WB5AGZ
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