Except for my fear of mailers not liking text/whatever, I'm very tempted to
pretend that TEXT/plain wasn't ever defined, at least for sending purposes.
I see no point in prohibiting recipient-imposed wrapping. I can't see any
downside at all to sending even short lines in text/paragraph. This is
another thing that makes me think 2046 was wrong to add the "no wrap"
restriction.
Ahem. First of all, RFC 2046 doesn't have a "no wrap" restriction. What it
does is state that text/plain must be formatted so that wrapping is not
required for proper display. The CRLFs that are there are meaningful and, if
possible, should be honored to get the best possible result.
But nowhere is display wrapping forbidden, and indeed, it is obvious that
wrapping may be necessary on, say, very narrow displays like PDAs.
Second, none of this is new to RFC 2046. The same requirements were in
RFC 1341 and RFC 1521, but unfortunately there were problems with the phrasing
that resulted in some people misinterpreting things. The only thing that
was changed was the phrasing; the requirements in this area are the same
as what was agreed to by the Working Group. Indeed, at the time I and several
others would have regarded a definition of text/plain that allowed for
text/paragraph behavior as a showstapper.
Ned