[X4U] Commentary: Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree

[Doug McNutt]

At 08:41 -0400 10/16/06, Mark Des Cotes wrote:
>X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.2)
><x-flowed>can't access the article. I get an "Invalid asset ID" message.

And then quoted -and I trimmed
>On 16-Oct-06, at 7:54 AM, J Flenner wrote:
>
> > Any responses for this fellow?
> > http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?
>> id=1160730321685
> > _______________________________________________
></x-flowed>

At 08:39 -0700 10/16/06, Ed Graf wrote:
>The URL he gave:
>
>><http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?>http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?
>>id=1160730321685
>
>when copied and pasted into any browser, should give:
>><http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?%20>http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?%20id=1160730321685
>
>erase the "%20" characters, right after the ? and just before the i in id.

Note that the whole problem is created by Apple's mail.app which introduces more spaces than are required as it wraps lines to less than 80 characters while creating format-flowed messages.

Apple says it's following the rules but it's relying on a newer version of the format-flowed RFC when it expects all mail clients to remove the extra spaces at the line ends when told to do so by a new parameter which can easily be dropped by a mailing list in digest mode.

Argue about who's right but no matter what you conclude, it's a problem that occurs with Apple's mail.app which could cooperate with older mail clients if it wanted to. Mail.app can even mess up long URL's that are enclosed in <> characters.

Perhaps the lawyer who started this could have been more technical about his complaints but then Internet Explorer to which he tunes his own web pages is far worse than mail.app at ignoring RFC's.

-- 

-->  Halloween  == Oct 31 == Dec 25 == Christmas  <--