From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!menlo70!sytek!zehntel!tektronix!tekmdp!dadla!dadla-b!hutch
Newsgroups: net.flame
Title: Re: NOT ALL LOWER CASE
Article-I.D.: dadla-b.365
Posted: Thu Mar  3 11:20:06 1983
Received: Fri Mar 11 06:28:11 1983
References: ucbvax.1017

OK, Ken, heres a flame from a master arsonist.

WHY do certain people assume that their special escape sequences will
work on other people's terminals?

It's not bad enough that I have to read stuff by wilful illiterates
who refuse to punctuate or capitalize for whatever pinheaded reasons
(inflammatory enough, Ken?)  but to add insult to injury, some subversives
from HP or some such off-the-wall place insist on trying to include their
boldface, italic, blinkety-blanking, or whatever they are, special terminal
field sequences inside otherwise harmless text.

This causes no end of eye-wrenching.  It's even worse than that silly
lopsided smiley-face that some people seem to want to put on everything
they write, as if seeing an obscure little typographical glitch that
resembles certain euphemistic replacements for foul language, should
defuse my irritation at their generally unnecessary remarks (you're on
a roll, hutch, keep stoking) when I HATE misplaced punctuation almost as
much as the oddball terminal commands!

And besides, why do people think that quotes should be used for emphasis?
Why can't they enclose quoted words INSIDE the quote marks?  Foo'' just
doesn't do it for me, people.  'Foo' is the common usage.

(Hmm.  Losing the razor-edge of nastiness, hutch.  Should either quit
or say something really off-the-wall.)

You know, folks, this whole discussion of upper and lower case stuff
reminds me of the pseudo-religious claptrap that was exchanged by
our departed comrade rvpalliende.  It really doesn't matter whether
you have an atrophied little finger, or only one hand, so you can't
hit SHIFT and j-random-key at the same time.  After all, what are text
processors for?  Isn't this the great UN*X system, the sole and holy
repository of the true faith:  tools-based systems design?

Why can't we just write a preprocessor into, say, inews, which would
run spell, and capitalize and/or format into a network-wide standard.
And we can spend the next four years discussing the standard, right here
in net.flame!

hutch

(Oops.  Two paragraphs above I meant to say "rvpalliende and his friends"
rather than just "rvpalliende.")