Re: [gentoo-user] Thunderbird ">"

[Holly Bostick]

Benno Schulenberg schreef:
> Holly Bostick wrote:
>
>>What I meant to say was:
>>
>>>">sys-kernel-2.4.28-r9"
>>
>>there should be a 'greater-than" sign in fron of the package name,
>
>
> There was a greater-than for me, in KMail, also in your first mail.
> Apparently Thunderbird hides it from you.  But it should do that
> only for ">From " and nothing else.  Bug in TB?
>
> Benno


Yes and no-- the ">" character is the symbol used to distinguish quotes
from regular text-- and Thunderbird converts this character to a colored
vertical line, so that quoted text looks like this when displayed:

| here is my quoted text
| and here is some more.

I don't have an issue with this behaviour in general (in fact, I like
the way quoted text is signified under normal circumstances). The
problem is that, in this particular case, the ">" character was the
first non-whitespace character in the line, and T-Bird had no way of
knowing that it was not intended to represent a traditional quote
signifier, but was meant to remain itself. That is, of course, the whole
point of escape characters; to tell the program in question that a
character it has a standard meaning for should in this particular case
not be "translated" to that meaning, but is meant to be "just itself".

The situation happens very rarely to me, but it's 'obvious' enough
(especially to programmers and scripters, who use escape characters all
the time) that I'm sure there must be some workaround for it for
Thunderbird (since this is Thunderbird-specific behaviour, which I have
noticed in the past, as well as the fact that KMail, for example, does
not do this); I just don't know what it is.

If there isn't, that *would* be a bug. I'll check MozillaZine and Google
later.... Mozdev seems to like to hide this stuff. If you've ever tried
to find the list of command-line switches for Netscape/Moz/Firefox on
the Internet, you'll know exactly what I mean.

Holly

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