st: Re: statalist-digest V4 #1014

[baum <baum@bc.edu>]

--On Saturday, September 21, 2002 2:33 -0400 Hakon wrote:

> Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 16:59:01 +0200
> From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Finne_H=E5kon?= <Hakon.Finne@sintef.no>
> Subject: st: RE: Huh?
>
> The ASCII code for the equal sign = is 3D in hexadecimal notation. I guess
> that minor incompatibilities between various e-mail software packages have
> resulted in the author's = becoming the reader's =3D and similarly ==
> becoming =3D=3D . Conclusion: readers should disregard 3D.
>
> - --H�kon
> hakon.finne@sintef.no
I am aware of that; my email reader (Mulberry) has no problem with ASCII 
text properly encoded. As a glance at
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/lwgate/STATALIST/archives/statalist.020
9/date/article-345.html
will show, the problem is in the sender's encoding of the message.
A corollary would be that readers are likely to disregard entire messages 
that are corrupted by various flavo(u)rs of non-alphanumeric materials. 
Despite all exhortations in the Statalist FAQ, there continue to be a 
number of postings that contain 'vCards', 'winmail.vcf', HTML translations 
of the message, and in one recent case an entire message that was presented 
only in HTML, making it essentially unreadable in an ASCII email reader. I 
realise (from the frustrations expressed by some list authors who have 
tried and failed to disable 'winmail', 'vCards', etc. when tied to 
Microsoft email clients) that it may be difficult to comply with the 
Statalist FAQ, but I would urge authors to try to do so. The extraneous 
crud clutters up and lengthens the messages and makes the archives less 
usable by those seeking help.

Thanks
Kit
________________________________________________________________________
Christopher F Baum, Boston College Economics, Chestnut Hill MA 02467 USA
baum@bc.edu                       http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-v/baum.fac.html
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