Re: TEXTAREA line terminators revisited

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Thu, 12 Jan 95 09:48:36 EST

> If, on the other hand, we are saying that when a reader (client-side)
> fills in a form, the client must insert a standard line-ending
> no matter what the default line ending is on that platform,
> then this sounds like a great idea. I only wonder why would CRLF
> be considered the best candidate? Wouldn't it be a lot easier
> to deal with a single character as a line ending? What happens
> when a reader on an X Window System machine uses the mouse to
> cut and paste text into the TEXTAREA? Since the X Window buffer
> contains LF's as line endings, is the application required to
> interpret the LF's and prepend a CR for each one?

I _think_ what we are talking about is how the contents of a
form are put into some consistent representation before being
sent over the network (i.e. in a POST).

Internet standards don't need to say much about the internals of a program,
and as you suggest, one needs to comply with other standards for
inter-application communication.

CRLF is not efficent, but the Net-ASCII representation of text using
it has a long history in Internet standards: it's in telnet, FTP,
SMTP, MIME, NNTP, and Gopher: the majority of other protocols besides
HTTP that WWW interacts with. (Though I think there is also a long history
of "sloppy" Unix servers that used just LF.)

-- 
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu