On Mon, 17 Aug 1998, Ned Freed <Ned(_dot_)Freed(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com> writes
If there is no way to tag a line as "don't wrap this", replies to
standard text/plain messages MUST NOT be promoted to format=flowed
Promotion to format=flowed should be done with care, and probably only
under user direction, as I see it. It's the safest course.
Users won't be aware of the problems of promoting to format-flowed -
they will probably always do it so that their own text will look pretty.
The result will be that quoted text will get miss-attributed whenever
any non-standard quote character has been used.
This is but one of many potential problems. FWIW, the one that bothers me the
most is that preformatted material such as tables can get damaged.
Specifically, a user may see something that looks OK when they display it due
to their choice of widths. But when they resend it labelled as flowed it
subsequently gets ruined.
I don't see how that poses a problem at all - it is entirely a matter
for the user. If they want to send preformatted material, they will have
to send unflowed text (presuming all MUAs give a choice between flowed
and unflowed text).
However, I fail to see what this has to do with the present proposal. Yes, if
you do promotion to flowed text willy-nilly you can have trouble. But this is
already happening -- lots of deployed agents do this sort of promotion
routinely, and it isn't going to stop no matter what the standards say.
Paragraph-oriented text is restricted at the moment to non-compliant
MUAs abusing text/plain. As soon as there is a standard way of labelling
paragraph text, it will probably become much more common. Promotion of
format=flowed to format=fixed will then lead to broken display/reply
as in:
: ian: randy> } This paragraph has been quoted five times using quoting
conventions often seen. How will you display it correctly, let alone reply and
quote correctly: especially if the user wants to split the paragraph in two?
The problem of quoted text being badly displayed and badly requoted will
have become a consequence of a published standard rather than the
consequence of a non-conformant MUA breaking text/plain - much worse IMO.
However, if this sort of quoting problem is not considered important, I
would much rather see the original idea of text/paragraph or
format=flowed as a simple label for paragraph oriented text rather
than any line-ending encoding scheme (the problem is actually less severe
in a labelling scheme).
--
Ian Bell T U R N P I K E Ltd