Content compression, was Re: "HTML" Posting Tags, was Top-posting shenanigans

[Tom Jennings]

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005, Tom Peters wrote:

> <soapbox>The rise of pseudo-HTML tags (which, more properly, would be XML 
> tags, yes?) has given the user community yet another new method of adding 
> nonverbal expression to what is essentially an expressionless communication 
> method. 
> [...]
> HCML: Hyper-contextual mark-up language.
> </soapbox>

This reminds me of a related issue...  my friend Randy Bush, back
when we were both still in the FIDOTECH echo (or whatever it was
called, the FidoNet protocol "newsgroup") told us about a new text
compression tool he'd come up with, a based upon scheme that
determined the meaning and content of the text itself; the only
problem was that when he ran it on the texts of that particular
echo [group], the resulting files were all of zero length.