From: gneuner2@comcast.net   
      
   On Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:38:46 GMT, scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal)   
   wrote:   
      
   >George Neuner  writes:   
      
   >>   
   >>I have seen many postings from GG that had - not kidding - *hundreds*   
   >>of lines of hidden HTML formatting for a few lines of text.  The worst   
   >>example I have seen was a message posted to comp.lang.scheme several   
   >>years ago - the message was 18KB and contained 2 words - "thank you" -   
   >>in the midst of over 900 lines of HTML formatting.   
   >   
   >I don't recall any google groups posts that were HTML formatted;   
   >there were some NNTP clients that would happily post in HTML instead   
   >of the RFC required plaintext, however.  I think thunderbird may   
   >have been able to be configured to post in HTML.   
      
   Lots of NN readers simply ignore HTML without rendering it [or can be   
   configured to do so].  If your NN reader will show you the raw   
   message, you'll see that [not all, but] many have HTML formatting in   
   them.   
      
      
   Every GG post has an "envelope" of HTML - inserted by the GG editor.   
   If your NN reader shows the overall line count of the message, and you   
   count the actual lines of text, you'll find they differ by some   
   amount.  If the message was composed offline and just pasted into   
   their editor for posting, the difference would be negligible.  But if   
   the message was composed *using* their editor ...   
      
      
   I noticed that all the ridiculous length messages with seemingly   
   nothing in them were coming from people using GG and so I experimented   
   with their message editor.   
      
      
   I discovered that - other than backspace - any edit made to the text   
   brought in a new [hidden] formatting envelope for the new text.   
      
   E.g., if you initially typed "thequickbrownfox", you'd get some   
   [barely legal] result like:   
      
      
   thequickbrownfox   
      
      
   Then if you went back and inserted spaces between the words, you'd get   
   the style reapplied once for every edit you made:   
      
      
      
      
      
   the quick brown fox   
      
      
   3 spaces added, 3 reapplications of formatting.   
      
      
   Starting a new paragraph inserted a new style envelope and began   
   again.  Inserting ahead of the first text would wrap the whole message   
   in yet another new style envelope.  The more you played with the text,   
   the longer and more complicated the formatting became.   
      
   The GG editor *would* display the formatting, but only if you asked to   
   see the raw message. The editor had no style controls other than bold,   
   italic, etc., but you could edit the raw HTML style(s) to change   
   whatever you wished and it would be displayed that way by Google or   
   other NN reader that understood HTML.  But few people ever looked at   
   their raw messages, and unless you directly edited the HTML it mostly   
   made little difference to the display.   
      
   I did file a bug report with Google about the proliferation of   
   formatting code - and they did fix it ... eventually, after the better   
   part of a year.  Meanwhile how many messages were posted with scads of   
   hidden formatting?   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)