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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: FYI: underlining/highlighting in news articles
Message-ID: <552@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 3-Dec-84 11:19:05 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.552
Posted: Mon Dec  3 11:19:05 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 4-Dec-84 19:15:59 EST
References: <> <1951@nsc.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 23

I think Chuq misunderstands.  We did indeed once have problems
because of special purpose escape sequences embedded in news
articles.  Someone included the sequence that underlined text
on a Concept 100, and that same sequence locked the keyboard
on every HP terminal on the net that read the article.  Many
people were (quite justifiably) unhappy.  Shortly thereafter,
code was put into inews to refuse to pass any but the most
vanilla control characters.  This is why you'll occasionally
see a message like 'helo[Dlo' - somebody pressed the left
arrow key on their keyboard instead of backspace, the left
arrow sequence (often ESC [ D) was transmitted, and inews took
out the dangerous ESC character.

However, what Karl is posting is quite harmless - it just has
backspaces in it.  I don't know of any terminals that choke on
backspaces (although some printers do bizarre things with them.)
The underlining or reverse video you see is the result of your
user interface (rn or vnews or more) doing the translation from
_ BS char to underlined char.  This translation is done on the
machine where the news is being read, so it's done for the right
terminal.

	Mark Horton