At 8:25 AM 8/25/93 -0400, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
If, for example, your UA does auto-wrapping as the user types text, then the
line breaks are really up to you anyway, so you don't ever need to have
such lines.
Most of the time most people are happy with this approach. But experience
tells me that line breaks really aren't up to the UA -- that they shouldn't
be up to the UA, but instead should be at the discretion of the user. This
is really a discussion of what should be done in the limit. The question
isn't "at what column should the UA force the line break?". Rather it is
"how can a UA help Sender A send a message which doesn't look stupid when
read by Recipient B?". Any rule which presupposes either the sender or
receiver's environment will be wrong under some circumstances, even if
right almost all of the time.
It's the times when it is wrong that users get frustrated at the limits
imposed by the UA -- and then the next message is hate mail to the UA's
author :-).
john noerenberg
jwn2(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com
noerenberg.j (Applelink)
In San Francisco, CA 8/24-27 attending INTEROP '93!
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Days to come stand in front of us like a row of lighted candles---
golden, warm and vivid candles.
-- Candles, Constantine Peter Cavafy [1899]
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