Re: TEXTAREA line terminators revisited

cwilson@spry.com
Thu, 12 Jan 95 12:57:27 EST

Murray Maloney <murray@sco.COM> wrote:
>I'm not sure that I understand this question fully
>-- because if I do, then I can't see how we can
>insist on CRLF.

>So, are we saying that if I, as an information provider (server-side)
>create a TEXTAREA which includes text in it with lines that
>end with something other than CRLF, then my readers (client-side)
>will not see my line endings?

Be conformant in what you produce, but liberal in what you accept. Ad nauseum.
At any rate, I think we were talking about the return values when it gets
POSTed to a script, not the input values in HTML. I may accept and display
your 'CR-only'-terminated lines, but when I return the contents of the TEXTAREA
to the server, I translate them to CRLFs.

>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.

Yeah. What you said. :^)

>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?

Well, from some perspectives. However, there's a large base of
specs and implementations that use CRLFs (MIME, for example.
RFC-822.) It might not be more "efficient", but it is (_I_ think)
in wider use. Flame away.

>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?

Not a sufficient argument, since the exact reverse would happen on my Windows
machine, and there are more Windows machines than X Windows systems. It would
have been nice if way back when, everyone had agreed on ONE EOLN standard. Ah,
well, the box is open now, Pandora. :^)

-Chris Wilson

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