Clarification of Answer by
eiffel-ga
on
01 Jul 2002 00:06 PDT
I emailed Pete Resnick to confirm this, and have now received the following reply:
Yes, I am the "pete" in "x-stuff-for-pete". I am also the "Pete" and
the "PETE" in many of the Macsbug symbols in Eudora. Some of those
are quite amusing.....
Please feel free to repost this message if you like:
The answer eiffel-ga gives is pretty darn close to accurate.
I am the engineer who wrote just about all of the text handling code
in Eudora. (So, when you type "a" and "b" appears on the screen,
that's my fault!) One of the pieces of code that I wrote was a simple
HTML interpreter that takes an HTML message and displays it in
Eudora. It isn't a very smart HTML engine (it doesn't understand
tables or style sheets), but for most e-mail messages, it gets the
job done. Most of message handling code was written by Steve Dorner,
the original creator of Eudora. The HTML code that I wrote only ever
sees the text of the message. The message handling code that Steve
wrote is responsible for handing that text to my code.
However, HTML e-mail messages may have some special header fields at
the top of the message that my HTML handling code needs to know
about. Specifically, they are "Content-Base:", "Content-Location:",
and the "charset" parameter of the "Content-Type:" header field.
Also, if the HTML message has embedded pictures and other parts
attached to the message, there is a special folder on the disk where
those parts are stored.
The "x-stuff-for-pete" tag is inserted by Steve's message handling
code when it receives a message. In it, Steve's code puts the data
from the "Content-Base:" (into the "base=" attribute), the
"Content-Location:" (into the "src=" attribute), the "charset" (into
the "charset=" attribute), and Eudora's internal ID number that tells
it where the attached pictures and things are stored (in the "id="
attribute).
The "x-stuff-for-pete" tag *NEVER* appears outside of Eudora. It is
only used in Eudora's internal storage. When we send a message that
has HTML in it, we strip out the "x-stuff-for-pete" tag and format
the message appropriately.
The "x-stuff-for-pete" tag has *NOTHING* to do with spam (except for
the fact that lots of spam has HTML).
I hope that answers everyone's questions. There's lots of low-level
silliness in Eudora. The "x-stuff-for-pete" tag just happens to be a
user-visible example.
pr
