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From: "William M. Perry" <wmperry@aventail.com>
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Subject: Re: Acronym lookups
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 1997 11:28:36 -0800
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Wesley Hardaker writes:
>>>>>> "Per" == Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:
>
>Per> I don't see it has anything to do with news, it should be a separate
>Per> package like webster.el, and posted to gnu.emacs.sources. 
>
>Well, I'm not sure I totally agree...  Granted, it should probably be
>posted there as well, but...  Shouldn't all good news readers (ie,
>pretty much just gnus) be able to help you decypher the articles you
>are reading, and hence be able to look up acronyms?  I mean, you have
>rot13 built in to decode articles, what about acronym-lookup...
>
>Feeling in sort of a devils advocate kinda mood...  sorry...

  This has been bothering me a bit lately.  Lars (GNUS), Kyle (VM), and I
(W3) seem to be reimplementing a lot of the same functionality.  Notably
base64 decoding, md5, POP functionality, rot13, etc, etc.

  _ALL_ of this functionality should be available to other applications
easily, without requiring the user to load up all of GNUS/VM/W3 to be able
to base64 a !%#*ing file.  This is one of the reasons I've been slowly
rewriting chunks of W3 to be more modular.  VM, GNUS, and W3 can all
benefit from a standard set of libraries that do:

  - Mailcap Parsing
  - base64 (en|de)coder
  - Quoted printable (en|de)code
  - rot13 display code
  - URL loading
  - RFC822 header parsing

  Any others?

  Can't we all just get along? :) I'd love to see VM use a user's mailcap
file now that it has MIME suppport, GNUS too.  Well, enough of this tirade,
I'll send mail to lars and kyle privately to discuss some of this, and
hope.

  As you can guess, I'd say distribute it separately, and do your best not
to require stuff you don't absolutely need from GNUS, to make it easier for
people to using it elsewhere.

-Bill P.