In particular, for information of folks, Bert's mailer used a form of MIME
encoding. MIME stands for something like "Multimedia Internet Mail Exchange"
and allows attachments and fonts and various cool things. More and more mail
readers are supporting it.
The form of encoding used is called "quoted printable", which is used to allow
characters other than plain ASCII to be sent though mail relays that mangle
anything that *isn't* ASCII.
So when you see something with an equal sign followed by two hexadecimal
digits (0-9 and A-F) that doesn't make sense, that's probably what it is. IN
this example, the '=' means "here's a non-ASCII character" and the 'F8' is the
hexadecimal (base sixteen) representation of the binary code for that
character.
Bert, Reed and my mail reader display it as a slashed circle; other mail
readers which don't understand let the naked "=F8" through.
Hope this helps people understand what's going on; sorry for the lack of Jazz
content.
--berry "I'm *good* a this techy stuff, but my jazz chops need work..."
Berry Kercheval :: kerch@parc.xerox.com :: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center