On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 04:40:10PM -0800, Ned Freed wrote:
So, there are three choices:
1) just compress whitespace at fold points
2) compress all whitespace
3) no compression
I strongly object to (1) and (2). Making the header test not respect interior
spaces is a _really_ bad idea. Like it or not, there are communities that are
very sensitive to spacing issues (many Japanese users seem to qualify) and
these communites need to be able to test and see exactly what sorts of spaces
are present in fields (and possibly modify them).
I think the same logic that led to the consensus of stripping trailing white
space might help:
How does the MUA present the header?
MUAs do not compress all whitespace. If Sieve did, comparisons would not
work as the user expects them to. To me, that's a second reason against
(2).
Both UCB mail and mutt do compress whitespace at fold points for the
overview and show all whitespace at fold points when displaying the
message, including the newline. Both surprises me, and I do not like it.
So much for logic. ;-)
Not looking at MIME, (1) might remove white spaces that were originally
part of the message, but happened to be at the folding position.
I dislike the thought of not seeing the original content.
As a result, I vote for (3).
Michael