On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Randall Gellens <randy(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com> writes
At 7:32 AM -0700 8/14/98, Ian Bell wrote:
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.
Comments were solicited as to the UseNet signature convention.
Many people generate it, but does anyone care about it on reception?
Yes! It seems to me that the major purpose of using a standard sig-
separator is that receiving MUAs can strip off the signature when
replies are being prepared. This prevents messages being bloated by
including quoted signatures, or forcing users to snip out signatures by
hand. Not treating "-- " specially may break this.
Overall, I tend to agree with the original consensus that the use of
trailing space is not a good solution to the problem of paragraph-
oriented text. Indeed, most solutions appear to be worse than the
problem itself - heuristics may be applied reasonably successfully to
detect abuse of text/plain, but text/paragraph etc. could irreversibly
break message attribution.
--
Ian Bell T U R N P I K E Ltd