Subj : Re: MMTerm?
To   : Ben Carpenter
From : William McBrine
Date : Sun Apr 15 2001 10:27 pm

-=> Ben Carpenter wrote to Jim Hanoian <=-

 BC> For a long time reading the Bluewave Echo I was hearing how much
 BC> better Bluewave was than QWK and during this time I was using QWK on a 
 BC> TBBS system.  QWK on a Maximus system is very limited but on a Wildcat
 BC> and TBBS system has all the features and more than the Bluewave format
 BC> except File transfer.

Not true... although I don't think one can really compare QWK on Wildcat to
Blue Wave _on Wildcat_, since TTBOMK, there is no Blue Wave on Wildcat. :-)
I dunno about TBBS.

QWK sucks in general. Maximus' QWK just sucks a lot worse.

 BC> Ok what I guess I was trying to say is that there were some bad 
 BC> implementations of QWK but also some good ones.

Yes, there are better and worse implementations of QWK, and of Blue Wave
too. But those differences aside, the Blue Wave format is objectively
better than QWK. Here are some of its advantages:

* Long To, From, and (especially) Subject fields -- The lengths in Blue
  Wave packets are 35 characters for To and From, and 71 characters for the
  Subject. QWK is limited to just 25 characters for each of them.

* Fido netmail is natively supported in the Blue Wave format.

* Offline config is standardized in Blue Wave.

* Version 3 of the Blue Wave specs supports Internet news and email, though 
  this is not widely implemented.

When it comes to Fidonet, Blue Wave has a particular advantage: unlike QWK, 
it was designed with Fido in mind. Not only do the lengths of the header 
fields correspond, but in fact the entire message format is a close copy of 
the Fido message format.

For QWK, there are ways around each of the problems outlined above -- but
no _standard_. That's the _real_ problem. The de facto standard QWK spec
(there _is_ no official standard, unless you count a small piece of the 1st
Reader manual, which is a joke) documents several different and
incompatible ways that specific doors and readers kludge in long subject
lines and netmail addresses. Even offline config, which is probably the
most standardized of the extensions, is done in one of two different basic
ways, with a lot more variation in the details.

Probably the best attempt at improving the QWK situation was the "QWKE"  
standard, which addressed these issues in a mostly-backwards-compatible
way. Still, it felt short on a few points, including breadth of adoption.

In pratice, QWK is often more useful than Blue Wave simply because of the
wider selection of doors and readers that support it. But if you look into
the innards, as I have, it's not a pretty sight. For all that, I'm not an
especial fan of the Blue Wave format either; but it does beat QWK.

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